The Washington Post National Weekly. April 5, 2020

SUNDAY, APRIL 5, 2020

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IN COLLABORATION WITH

ABCDE National Weekly

the coronavirus pandemic

Losses, big and small

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analysis

The cost of a delayed response BY

P HILIP B UMP

W

hen six counties in the San Francisco Bay area went under a mandatory stay-at-home order on March 16, it seemed like an exceptional development in the effort to slow the spread of the coronavirus that arrived in the United States in January. At that point, there were fewer than 5,000 confirmed cases nationally, about 400 of which were in California.

Since then, of course, such orders have become commonplace. As of March 27, less than two weeks after the Bay Area’s order, more than half the country’s population was under a stay-at-home order at the statewide level. By the end of this weekend, nearly 9 in 10 Americans will be. Include localized orders, as in multiple places in Missouri, and the number tops 90 percent.

The goal of these orders is to limit the extent to which people interact and, hopefully, to therefore limit the spread of the novel coronavirus that has now infected more than 250,000 Americans, as of Friday. Just because an order is in place, though, does not mean it came early enough to have the desired effect.

Our current understanding of the virus is that it manifests within two weeks of infection.

The idea of isolation efforts is to keep people separated for at least that long to contain and identify where it has spread. Within two weeks of a stay-at-home order, then, assuming that it is adhered to rigidly and that testing is robust, one would expect to see a slowdown in the number of confirmed coronavirus infections.

Both of those assumptions, though, are shaky in practice. The number of tests being conducted each day in the United States has stalled at about 100,000, limiting the ability to conduct robust testing. The orders themselves

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Joe Raedle/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

The empty boardwalk is seen Tuesday in Hollywood, Fla. Many cities along the coastline closed their beaches.

have been enforced unevenly.

Consider New York state. It has had a statewide order in place since March 22, but the number of confirmed cases has continued to rise. By now, there are more than 400 confirmed cases for every 100,000 people in the state — the highest ratio in the country and no doubt an undercount of the actual total.

There have been a number of states with stay-at-home orders in place where the number of cases has grown relatively slowly. California is the poster child of a successful effort to slow the spread of the virus. When it implemented its statewide order only a few days after the Bay Area was locked down, there were about three infections for every 100,000 people in the state.

Since then, the number has increased, but only to about 24 infections per 100,000 people.

Illinois has not done quite as well, climbing from six infections per 100,000 residents to 55,

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but the state has still seen a relatively slow increase in new cases.

Other large states like Massachusetts and Michigan are seeing infection rates continue to climb quickly.

Washington, the site of the first reported case in the country, is something of an anomaly.

It was relatively late to issuing a statewide stay-at-home order, but other localized efforts had been successful at limiting the number of new infections.

More worrisome are states and regions that only recently enacted stay-at-home orders.

Many already have much higher rates of infection relative to population, like Florida’s 32 cases per 100,000 residents. Most worrisome is Washington, D.C., where the stay-at-home order went into effect as the number of confirmed cases was at 83 per 100,000 residents — higher than the 81 per 100,000 when New York’s order went into place.

Stay-at-home orders are only one component of the effort to slow the spread of the virus, and the effectiveness of the orders depends on how they are implemented and their scale. (In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has mandated that the statewide order take precedence over local orders, meaning local areas cannot have stricter policies than the state itself.) Other factors, like population density, also play an important role. The states that have not yet implemented stay-at-home orders are mostly heavily rural.

The extent to which these policies worked will be measured by a very grim metric: the number of people whose deaths are related to the virus or as a result of hospital capacity being overwhelmed by patients infected with the virus. We should all hope states will rapidly shift toward the path California is on. The fear is that they will look more like New York. n

Contents Coronavirus Books Opinion Five Myths

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On the cover A medical worker works inside a refrigerated container truck functioning as a makeshift morgue on Tuesday at Brooklyn Hospital Center in New York. Photo by JOHN MINCHILLO of the Associated Press

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The coronavirus pandemic

Trump shifts stance on virus policy

BY A SHLEY P ARKER, J OSH D AWSEY AND Y ASMEEN A BUTALEB

I

n announcing that the country would remain shut down through April because of the coronavirus pandemic, President Trump and his advisers pointed to factors ranging from grim computer models showing millions of potential deaths to the unsettling sight of body bags lined up outside a Queens hospital.

Trump adopted a newly somber and sedate tone throughout the week — and contradicted many of his own previous assessments of the virus — as he instructed Americans to continue social distancing, school closures and other mitigation efforts for an additional 30 days and to think of the choices they make as matters of life and death.

But for Trump, political considerations also played a meaningful role, according to three people familiar with the discussions, speaking on the condition of anonymity to share candid discussions.

Aides and advisers say the president was heavily influenced by briefings from scientific and public health officials, as well as by the stark reality of the virus, including projections of greater deaths depending on what measures the government takes.

But Trump campaign officials and political allies had also briefed the president in days prior to the announcement about their fears of reopening the economy too soon, arguing that a spike in deaths could be even more politically damaging in November than the current economic downturn, which saw more than 10 million people file for unemployment benefits in March, according to two of the people familiar with the discussions. Campaign officials declined to comment.

Public health officials warned Trump that many rural areas — which form the bedrock of the president’s political support —

Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post

Both public health and politics played a role in the president’s decision do not have the necessary hospitals and doctors to handle an outbreak, should it come.

Some administration officials had also circulated a Yahoo News/YouGov poll showing that 59 percent of Americans believed opening up “the country for business” by Easter, as Trump suggested repeatedly in March, was “too soon,” two of the people said. And Trump has been pleased by how his approval ratings have ticked up recently.

Calling in to “Fox & Friends” Monday, the president weighed in on the political implications of the virus when asked a question about the 2020 Democratic field.

“I’ve gotten great marks on

what we’ve done with respect to this,” Trump said. “I’ve gotten great marks. And even from almost every Democrat governor, so I’ve gotten great marks also.

But we want to always make sure that we have a great president, that we have somebody that’s capable.”

An undercurrent of political calculation has coursed through much of Trump’s decision-making on the coronavirus. Despite taking some early modest steps, the president initially spent weeks downplaying the threat of the virus, in large part because he was worried about the effect on the economy. He has also clashed with Democratic governors, especially when he has felt they are being insufficiently appreciative

President Trump and National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony S. Fauci listen during a covid-19 news briefing on Tuesday.

Fauci and others presented Trump with dire death projections, which helped shift the president’s view on virus response.

of the federal government’s relief efforts. And he first settled on an Easter timeline — which he has since extended to the end of April — in part because of an eagerness to reopen the economy sooner rather than later.

Some top advisers, however, have counseled patience, saying that despite Trump’s reputation as an impulsive decision-maker, he is often willing to allow situations to play out.

Trump “is presiding over the country’s response to an unanticipated, unprecedented pandemic of global proportions, and he is getting credit for his handling of the pandemic,” said Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president. “In due time, he will preside over the great American

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the coronavirus pandemic comeback, which is more likely to be in the summer or fall, depending on the effectiveness of mitigation and relief efforts and the uncertain path of the virus itself.”

This portrait of Trump’s decision to extend the government’s strict social-distancing guidelines to April 30 — more than two weeks beyond his initial “aspirational” goal of April 12 — comes from interviews with 15 senior administration officials, advisers, and outside allies and confidantes in frequent touch with the White House, many of them speaking on the condition of anonymity to share candid discussions and details.

Trump’s abrupt reversal was the result of several days of small group meetings during which he received briefings from public health and economic officials.

The president’s likely course of action was still “very fluid” a week ago Saturday, in the words of one outside Republican briefed on internal conversations.

By last Sunday, however, most officials — including those representing an economic perspective — were trending toward extending the social distancing guidelines.

At a Sunday task force meeting not attended by Trump, Vice President Pence asked the entire room whether anyone had any immediate concerns over extending the guidelines, and there were no objections.

The group then briefed the president on their recommendation, and once he made a decision, officials decided to put it out immediately during Sunday evening’s Rose Garden news conference. They felt that Trump’s decision was an urgent public health matter and worried it might leak if they tried to wait longer to announce the news.

Deborah Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, and Anthony S. Fauci, an infectious-disease expert, repeatedly presented the president with worst-case scenarios to underscore just how cataclysmic the crisis could get.

Birx, Fauci and Pence showed Trump models predicting that in a best-case scenario, as many as 100,000 to 200,000 Americans could die of covid-19, the disease caused by the virus — a warning

John Minchillo/Associated Press

A body wrapped in plastic that was unloaded from a refrigerated truck is handled by medical workers Tuesday at Brooklyn Hospital Center in New York.

“It’s terrible, what’s going on. It’s body bags all over, they’re bringing in refrigerator trucks to put the bodies in,” Trump said Monday on Fox News.

they also echoed publicly. Trump was similarly taken by a study two weeks ago from the Imperial College in London, which found that as many as 2.2 million Americans could die absent any mitigation measures.

Throughout the week, Trump — who has cast himself as a “wartime” president — sought to redefine just what a victory might look like.

“The worst thing we can do is declare victory. We’ve seen this — declare victory and then not have victory, and then have to do it all over again,” Trump told the Fox News hosts on Monday. “We have to get this thing gone, this virus.

We have to beat it. We’re at war.

This is a war.”

Other allies stressed that while Trump’s political fortunes are inextricably bound with his handling of the coronavirus response, in recent days, he has been increasingly driven by the responsibility as the commander in chief to protect the lives of Americans, after coming to understand just how deadly the pandemic is likely to be.

Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), who regularly speaks with the president, said Trump’s previous admonishments — that the cure cannot be worse than the virus — “flipped when he heard that 2.2 million could die if

he did nothing.”

“I just think the numbers of people that could die if you don’t aggressively treat this thing was a game-changer for him,” ­Graham said. “What he sees is the lethality of this thing unchecked, so now when you have 2.2 million lives at stake, you will accept more draconian measures than before.”

In addition to receiving briefings, the president has spent much of his time watching rapt as cable news and other outlets broadcast body bags and other harrowing images from the epicenter of the outbreak — Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, in the shadow of where Trump grew up — and found the dispatches unsettling, aides said.

“You know, I grew up near Elmhurst, and I look at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, and I’ve known it,” Trump said Monday on Fox News, echoing similar comments he made in the Rose Garden on Sunday.

“It’s terrible, what’s going on.

It’s body bags all over, they’re bringing in refrigerator trucks to put the bodies in, refrigerated trucks, big vans, like, big trucks are coming in.”

Throughout the coronavirus crisis, Trump has at times maintained an uneasy relationship with the public health and scien-

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tific communities, frustrated with their advice and directives that essentially have forced the economy to shut down.

But Trump also listens to Birx and Fauci, aides say, and has repeatedly cited them in explaining his thought process. Two officials familiar with internal discussions said Birx and the president have a good relationship, saying she understands how to work with Trump and he, in turn, respects her.

Allies and advisers also privately made the case to the president that it is better to suffer short-term pain now — such as the millions of Americans who have already filed for unemployment — in return for potential gain in several weeks by slowing infection and death rates.

The record $2 trillion economic stimulus legislation that Trump signed into law Friday also provided the president and some of his economic advisers a modicum of confidence.

As more U.S. cities faced severe outbreaks — including New York, New Orleans, Seattle and Detroit — administration officials questioned how much they could truly reopen the economy, if major cities remained shuttered.

“If consumers don’t want to leave their homes in July, we’re screwed,” said someone briefed on the response. “You have to do what you need to do to have a clean resolution to this so we can come out of this on the back end knowing that coronavirus has passed.”

By the time Trump ventured back into the Rose Garden on Monday evening, to talk more about the new guidelines, he seemed — for the time, at least — comfortable with his choice.

He mentioned the modeling that showed the peak in U.S. fatalities will not arrive for another two weeks and noted that these same projections show that “by very vigorously following these guidelines, we could save more than 1 million American lives.”

“Think of that: 1 million American lives,” the president said.

“Our future is in our own hands, and the choices and sacrifices we make will determine the fate of this virus and, really, the fate of our victory.” n

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THe coronavirus pandemic

Restaurants scrape by to stay afloat L AURA R EILEY in Tampa BY

O

ne day last month, the math became irrefutable.

On that day, Suzanne and Roger Perry laid off 175 employees in their small empire of Tampa Bay restaurants. They couldn’t gather everyone together to explain the layoffs — it would have exceeded the governor’s rules about crowd sizes. The managers had to phone people individually to break the news.

They told all those waiters and bussers and line cooks that they didn’t have enough hours to offer, couldn’t guarantee enough money to live on. Better to run to the unemployment office, get in line and start the paperwork.

After it was over, Suzanne Perry texted a reporter a picture of Ben the Dog, the office mascot, looking dejected. It was the first of several short, choppy texts full of pain.

“I’m in tears. Devastated. Trying to keep ‘leader face’ but unable in the chaos,” she texted after delivering the news.

“I don’t fall apart, and I’m falling apart,” she wrote a minute later.

Some are called to the hospitality industry, hard-wired for the pace. Others fall into it, waiting for something else to unfold.

Before the virus, a server at Datz could expect to pull in $300 in tips on a flush day. Top bartenders earned more than $75,000 a year. Some of the Perrys’ employees had been with them since the beginning, growing up, having families. Becoming family.

Now restaurants, like other public places, are painfully exposed to the economic effects of the pandemic. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis President James Bullard recently said unemployment could reach as high as 30 percent in the resulting recession.

In the hospitality industry, that number could be far higher, as tens of thousands of American restaurants have closed and owners like the Perrys make their individual calculations about

Photos by Eve Edelheit for The Washington Post

Independent eateries are paring away everything except the essentials. It may not be enough. how much longer they can hang on. Independent restaurants employ more than 10 million workers.

The Perrys had watched the virus news from other countries in February and early March as social gatherings were limited to 1,000 people, then 500, then.

They watched as the first cases were announced in the United States, as southeast Florida, the other side of the state, got hit hard because of snowbirds, spring-breakers and infected people coming off cruise ships.

The Perrys, Roger, 70, and Suzanne, 57, own a handful of eateries with a total of 700 seats. They came to the industry later in life but dove in feet first, making a splash with their first place, a deli called Datz, in 2009. It was embraced immediately for its audacity, its pluck. Its oversized sandwiches and “nothing succeeds like excess” mantra made it a darling of Instagram, with dishes such as the Cheesy Todd — a fat burger with two jalapeño mac-

and-cheese “buns” — capturing the attention of “Good Morning America.”

They bought the bakery space next door and opened Dough in April 2013, sending out bacon lattes, bacon eclairs and bacon chocolate chip cookies. They added the swankier Cajun-Creole Roux down the road in August 2014 and then Dr. BBQ in St. Petersburg in October 2018.

They also run the cafe and concessions at the James Museum of Western and Wildlife Art in St. Petersburg, which opened in April 2018, and a second nearby Datz location, which debuted in June 2019. They were shooting for April 1 to open the doors of a third Datz location in Riverview, with 5,900 square feet of indoor space and seating for 175 guests, plus two patios.

The tables and chairs are arrayed, the kitchen complete.

They hired 75 people for the new location, laying them all off before a single shock-and-awe sammie was sold.

Suzanne and Roger Perry, owners of the Datz Restaurant Group, at their restaurant Datz in Tampa. They laid off 175 people in one day last month. “I don’t fall apart, and I’m falling apart,” Suzanne said.

Datz’s Riverview location is in limbo. Or maybe done.

Roger Perry said they had already been calling nightly meetings, moving around key employees, slashing items with high food costs, reinventing the business every 12 hours, “making extreme pivots in what we are selling and who works for us.”

In a March 18 letter to President Trump, the National Restaurant Association projected restaurant sales would decline by $225 billion over the next three months, prompting the loss of between 5 million and 7 million jobs. Independent restaurants make up nearly 70 percent of the nation’s food service operators, according to Chicago-based foodservice database firm CHD. Even the successful ones operate on low margins and a tight cash flow.

Suzanne Perry still ruminates about how the layoffs went down.

In the aftermath, she texted a GIF of Kermit the Frog leaping off a building, with his puppet arms flailing. Gallows humor, but it fit her mood.

“We had a range of emotions from people, from ‘Yes, I absolutely understand, good luck and God bless,’ to real anger, people thinking we weren’t taking care of our people,” she says. “The ones who remain have survivors’ guilt.

We’re trying to salvage the company, and these are the people I need in the room when the plane drops the oxygen masks. They say you have to put it on yourself before you can help other people, right?”

“Suze isn’t doing well. We have no control over our destiny right now. The biggest fear to me is, there’s no end in sight. The anxiety is crushing,” he says.

The couple has applied for the state’s $50,000 interest-free loans under the Small Business Emergency Bridge Loan program, but they don’t know when or whether that money is coming.

They say they don’t have the personal reserves to continue more than a few weeks without government checks and loans.

Some supply vendors are try-

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the coronavirus pandemic ing hard to work with them and keep things running. But smaller vendors without deep cash reserves moved to a “cash on delivery” model almost immediately, Suzanne Perry says. She says she’s selling the entirety of her “epic” bourbon collection so she can keep staff another couple weeks.

Her $20,000 Pappy Van Winkle 25-year and all of her expensive, rare things are going.

On March 20, a few days after his first announcement, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) issued an additional executive order closing all on-site restaurant sales, causing every restaurateur in Florida to make the decision: Close entirely or pivot to takeout and delivery only?

The Perrys shifted to takeout and delivery.

They have started over before.

Roger Perry’s family was in animal feed, from which he built a pet food business, eventually selling 31 pet superstores to PetSmart in 1994 and retiring. He lived in Ocala, Fla., and raised Derby-worthy thoroughbreds in Kentucky. He met Suzanne.

Love shook up their lives and, in what was a second marriage for both, they relocated to Tampa in 2005 to build something new.

The city was unsophisticated then; there were mostly chain restaurants and gastronomic gaps, with no good deli like Zingerman’s in Ann Arbor, Mich., or Katzinger’s in Columbus, Ohio.

Having never been in the restaurant business, the Perrys thought they’d give it a go.

They were perpetually tinkering with Datz, adding a cheese counter and taking it away, developing a sassy social media game that helped their restaurants garner notice from the Travel Channel, Cooking Channel and Food Network.

On Monday, all sense of play was gone, the letters spelling out simply: “DatzTampa.com: Order online 15 percent off pickup.”

Roger sits in the office with Cheeto, the office cat, and Ben, the Humane Society rescue mutt, and lays out the grim math. Out of 400 employees at the start of the pandemic, they are down to 36, mostly senior salaried managers, everyone taking pay cuts to try to keep things afloat.

The Perrys started in the industry during the recession of

Weekly

As layo≠s grow, some firms say ‘no’

2008 and 2009. There was a huge reduction in the number of independent restaurants then, but they came roaring back. This is different, they say. The pandemic is making diners leery of togetherness, discomfited by the nurturing of strangers that has always been the guiding principle of the restaurant industry.

None of the employees they have let go has found another hospitality job, Suzanne Perry says, ticking off the other major Tampa Bay restaurants that have had to let employees go. The jobs just aren’t there.

She doesn’t know how many of her employees have applied for unemployment. According to the U.S. Labor Department, 3.3 million people filed for unemployment insurance the week ending March 21.

The Perrys’ own futures are on the line. Until the coronavirus, Roger Perry had intended to retire in the next few years. Every-

thing they have is mortgaged, so a loss of income probably will change their retirement plans.

As a handful of takeout orders are assembled on a Monday evening, Roger and Suzanne stand in the darkened restaurant space, the front doors open to keep things cool. They aren’t selling enough to pay the air conditioning and electric bill.

“We make three payments of $1,400 a month for electricity just for this location, another $1,600 to the city for trash and water,” Roger says, trailing off as he considers his restaurants’ other expenses.

So far today, Datz has sold about $1,000 worth of takeout. A pittance, Roger says. This location usually makes that for breakfast service alone. On a Monday.

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Ryan Bradford, manager of the Datz location in Tampa, delivers takeout orders to vehicles March 23.

n the evening of March 19, as statewide stay-athome orders were just beginning, reports of job layoffs were surging and the number of U.S. coronavirus cases topped 14,000 in the United States, Marsh & McLennan chief executive Dan Glaser made a pledge to his employees “I want to say to all of you that while we are in the thick of this global pandemic, your job is secure,” he said in a video message to the firm’s 76,000 global employees, including workers in its insurance and risk management, human resources, management consulting and reinsurance brokerage businesses.

He announced a $5 million fund that would offer grants to employees facing financial hardship and reminded people of the “formidable resources and financial strength” of the company. “We will be fine — if you are fine.”

As the coronavirus pandemic ravages the economy and brings a once-roaring labor market to a near-screeching halt, layoffs have mounted at a stunning pace. A record 6.6 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits two weeks ago, doubling the record set the previous week. But some companies have been holding off on job cuts at least temporarily, or offering other ways to cushion employees amid the crisis.

For Glaser, the calculus of making such a temporary pledge is far different than for a small retailer or travel industry start-up. Although he expects a “rough period,” he said, “we are among the fortunate not to have to worry about profitability or whether we’re going to survive.”

But because Marsh & McLennan is in what Glaser likes to call “a brains business” — reliant on his employees’ ability to focus on clients — he wanted to assuage fears and concerns.

“Are we really going to have somebody remotely call some-

body at their home — not knowing their personal circumstances in any degree, not knowing whether they have a loved one in the next room who’s struggling — and let them go?” Glaser said in an interview. “What would that say about us as a company?”

Several large financial institutions, including Morgan Stanley and Bank of America, said they will suspend layoffs until the end of the year.

Visa will have no covid-19 layoffs in 2020, chief executive Alfred F. Kelly Jr. said on LinkedIn. Salesforce.com chief executive Marc Benioff pledged March 25 “not to conduct any significant lay offs over the next 90 days,” and to continue to pay hourly workers while offices are shut down. Other companies have taken steps to cushion workers. Software firm Workday made one-time payments equal to two weeks’ pay to cover unforeseen costs. Columbia Sportswear reduced the salary of its chief executive to $10,000 a year while continuing to pay its roughly 3,500 U.S. employees who can’t work in its shuttered stores.

Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor at Stanford University’s business school, said he did not recall seeing many companies promise they would not make job cuts in the recession of 2009. The current downturn may be different because of worries about laying people off without health insurance amid a pandemic. Companies that were scrambling to hire people just a month ago may also worry about getting caught without them once the worst is over.

“At the end of all this, the companies that don’t lay people off are going to reduce all kinds of financial and other sources of stress, and people will be grateful and work harder,” Pfeffer said.

Leslie Gaines-Ross, chief reputation strategist for Weber Shandwick, pointed to sites such as DidTheyHelp.com. When the crisis passes, she said, “there’s a reputational reckoning that’s going to occur.” n

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books

The rush to upend traditional retail N ONFICTION

l

REVIEWED BY

B URT H ELM

H Billion Dollar Brand Club How Dollar Shave Club, Warby Parker, and Other Disruptors Are Remaking What We Buy

By Lawrence Igrassia Holt. 256 pp. $30

Customers try out products at a Glossier pop-up shop in Boston last year.

The makeup brand is one of many directto-consumer companies to emerge in recent years.

ow do you write a business book about a gold rush — as it’s happening?

Do you offer tips on where to buy pickaxes and how to read geologic maps? Do you recount the stories of the most wildly successful prospectors, in hopes that readers might emulate their groundbreaking habits and strategies later on? Or do you step back and write a broader cultural study, fingers crossed that you’ll correctly distinguish the truly brilliant from the frauds and the hucksters, dismiss the fads, and pinpoint the craze’s lasting influence on business and society — all by your publisher’s deadline?

Lawrence Ingrassia gamely faces down the present-day equivalent of this challenge with “Billion Dollar Brand Club.” His subject is the rise of direct-to-consumer (DTC) companies — start-ups, often with playful names (Warby Parker, Glossier, Casper), that skip traditional retailers to market their own products and brands straight to shoppers, online. By now, if you haven’t purchased a DTC product, you have certainly scrolled past their ads on Instagram and Facebook. They promise stylish, inexpensive versions of everyday products: eyeglasses, makeup, mattresses (offered by the above names, respectively) as well as electric toothbrushes, underwear, baby clothes — the list goes on.

But you may not know their backstory. Over the past 10 years, there’s been a mad dash by venture capitalists, MBAs, Ivy Leaguers and trust fund kids to start thousands of these brands. Collectively, investors have poured some $5 billion into new brands making all manner of household items, which have subsequently swiped billions in sales from their moreestablished competitors. The phenomenon’s crowning moment — so far, at least — came in 2016, when consumer-products giant Unilever paid $1 billion in cash to

Henry Holt and Co.

buy Dollar Shave Club, a subscription seller of discount safety razors that had been founded four years earlier by an improv comedian.

There’s gold in them thar sundries.

Ingrassia ventures into the hubbub, on the lookout for entrepreneurs who are “emblematic of the capitalist zeitgeist of his era.” He organizes the book as a series of self-contained narratives, each one focused on a different aspect of the DTC boom that he considers transformative: sourcing, financing, marketing, logistics. Fortunately he’s a natural storyteller with a playful ear for language.

The entrepreneurs’ stories, despite Ingrassia’s best efforts, tend to follow a common arc: The young would-be founders are minding their own business until an unexpected hassle or rip-off in their shopping lives derails everything. Inevitably the heroes quit whatever they are doing (typically management consulting, business school or some other résumé-builder) and dedicate their lives to solving the problem, naturally by offering a new prod-

uct to a sizable target market.

These days, founders hone their personal tall tales down to easily repeated bullet points they can shoot at investors, reporters, you name it. While researching the book, Ingrassia takes the incoming fire from the founders. To his credit, he also gathers novel perspectives from the supporting cast that helps shape these businesses: the zealous venture capitalists in San Francisco, the bemused manufacturers in Taiwan, the chagrined executives at the blue-chip consumer-products giant in Cincinnati who can’t believe what hit them.

But as the book hops from one part of the cottage industry to the next, skeptical readers begin to wonder: Is everything in direct-toconsumer-land as hunky-dory as its citizens would have Ingrassia believe? For instance, is anybody in this town actually making any money — or are they just raising and spending piles of it?

Too often, Ingrassia relies on the venture capitalists’ measures of success — big investment

rounds, big valuations, big buyouts — rather than digging for generally accepted standards like profits or product quality. Those hard metrics are crucial in determining these companies’ eventual legacy, especially now that more of these companies are beginning to lay off employees and partner with traditional retailers.

In other words, which feats of these enterprising founders will be remembered: their witty viral videos and savvy social media strategies — or the way they persuaded investors to hand them gobs of money, or wooed management consultants to join them for a fraction of their salaries, or inspired seen-it-all business reporters to gush about something as mundane as a safety razor? Hindsight will certainly render these illustrious members of the Billion Dollar Brand Club as brilliant marketers and salesmen. It may just turn out that their true marks weren’t actually the consumers. n Helm is an editor at large at Fast Company and Inc. magazines.

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The coronavirus pandemic

The vulnerabilities in rural America BY

G RIFF W ITTE

T

he snow-capped peaks of Idaho’s Wood River Valley are a magnet for movie stars and other wealthy tourists who throng the area each winter bearing their skis, their appetites and their cash. They come for the soft powder, stay for the parties at top-class restaurants and pump money into an otherwise remote wilderness region where the howl of wolves echoes through the night.

But this year, somewhere between the lifts and the lodge, the tourists left behind something else: a deadly virus.

Now the valley is a coronavirus hot spot, registering one of the highest infection rates per capita in the country. With 192 cases in a county of just 22,000 people — including two deaths — the share of the population testing positive is greater than even in New York City.

The impact has been dramatic: The small hospital in Ketchum, the region’s hub, has partially shut down after four of its seven emergency doctors were quarantined.

Patients are being ferried to facilities hours away. The fire department is relying on fresh-faced volunteers, trained in a day, to drive ambulances.

Everyone in town knows someone who has fallen ill.

The coronavirus “tore through this valley like a wildfire,” said Brent Russell, one of the emergency room doctors.

“I would say about a quarter of the people I know here have symptoms consistent with covid,” he added, referring to the disease caused by the coronavirus.

Russell, 50, would normally be treating them. But he was one of the first in the region to come down with the virus. After an agonizing 3½ weeks — including nights when he woke up barely able to breathe — Russell is only now returning to work to help cope with the ever-growing influx of new patients.

Along with a handful of other ski hubs in the western United States, the Wood River Valley —

Coast-to-Coast/Getty Images/iStock

An outbreak in an Idaho ski hub reveals the virus’s impact once it reaches scarcely populated areas whose population density is about 3,000 times less than New York City’s — offers a preview of what happens when the novel coronavirus escapes cities and attacks rural America.

Although scarcely populated areas offer some protection for a virus that thrives on social contact, they are hardly immune. And once infection creeps in, the effect in rural communities could be more severe given threadbare health systems, long distances to hospitals and elderly populations.

“The epidemic hasn’t really hit many rural communities yet. But it will. And they know that if it does hit them, it’s going to hit them harder,” said Olugbenga Ajilore, a senior economist at the Center for American Progress.

The vast majority of America’s coronavirus patients remain clustered in and around cities. That is where the disease got its start in the United States, as infected visitors arrived from abroad.

But there are few areas — even remote ones — that remain un-

touched by the coronavirus as it continues its relentless spread.

Montana and North Dakota recently recorded their first coronavirus deaths. In Washington state on Monday, Gov. Jay Inslee (D) noted a “disturbing” pattern of rural counties that had recorded remarkably high positive test rates — including one that was up to 21 percent. In rural Alabama, meanwhile, residents are bracing for bigger outbreaks of a virus that “could pop up anywhere,” said Rep. Robert B. Aderholt (R-Ala.), who represents a wide, thinly populated region in the northern half of the state.

When it does, he said, he fears an impact that “exposes the vulnerabilities in all of rural America,” including underfunded health systems and patchy broadband networks.

For now, at least, the virus’s early forays into the countryside have come with some respite: They are hitting areas that are better able to withstand them than most.

A slope at Sun Valley ski resort in Idaho.

Wood River Valley in Blaine County, home to the Sun Valley ski resort, has emerged as a coronavirus hot spot in the state, registering one of the highest infection rates per capita in the country.

Some of the worst affected areas, per capita, are recreation centers renowned for their natural beauty that attract large numbers of tourists and have thrived during the past decade of economic growth. The counties surrounding Vail and Crested Butte in Colorado and Park City in Utah — skiing meccas, all — have seen especially high concentrations of patients.

So has Blaine County, home to the Sun Valley ski resort, the city of Ketchum and Idaho’s largest coronavirus outbreak. Many celebrities have second homes in the region. The skiing is reputed to be some of the best in the country, and it’s a top destination on the conference circuit.

But the same factors that have helped the region thrive have also made it vulnerable to the coronavirus.

“We were doing so well, with lots of tourism,” said Scott Mason, who owns three restaurants in Ketchum. “But that’s why we’re getting so hard hit now.”

The area is particularly popular among tourists from Seattle, with direct flights to the small regional airport. Health experts say visitors from the area with the nation’s first coronavirus outbreak probably brought it to Idaho in the early days of the pandemic, before states and municipalities nationwide began to implement extreme restrictions intended to slow the spread.

Russell, the doctor, said he believes he contracted the virus before there were any confirmed cases in Idaho. An avid skier, he said innocuous-seeming conversations with visitors may have been the culprit.

“People think that skiing is a low-risk activity,” he said. “But you’re on a chairlift for two-thirds of the time, and you’re turning to face people to talk to them.”

Blaine County had its first two positive test results on March 14.

Sun Valley — the region’s major ski resort — announced the next day that it was closing for the season, weeks earlier than planned. The day after, Ketchum Mayor Neil Bradshaw did something he never thought he would:

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Virus depleting national stockpile BY

Darin Oswald/Associated Press

A hospital worker takes supplies at a donation drive in Boise, Idaho.

Because of limited hospital space and supplies in rural areas, some covid-19 patients have been transported to the state’s capital.

He wrote an open letter telling tourists to stay away.

“For a town used to welcoming visitors, that is hard to do,” he acknowledged in his piece for the Idaho Mountain Express. “But we must reduce the number of people visiting our area. . . . The message is clear: This is not a place for a virus vacation.”

The city immediately began to clear out. Hotels emptied. Restaurants shuttered.

But it was too late. At Blaine County’s only hospital, the 25-bed St. Luke’s Wood River Medical Center, the virus had hit the staff hard. Two emergency doctors, Russell included, tested positive.

Two others were believed to have been exposed and were in quarantine.

Without enough staff to keep the hospital running at full strength, administrators decided to transfer patients to other facilities and halt inpatient services.

Because nearby areas of Idaho are still relatively unaffected, it is a strategy that is working — for now.

“If the rest of the state were as hard hit as we are, we’d be in a real disaster here. It would be like Italy,” Russell said.

Even with those additional resources, the health system is under strain. Bill McLaughlin, the local fire chief, said about 10 percent of first responders have tested positive for covid-19. With patients being transported as far away as Boise — a five- or six-hour round-trip — he has had to sign up and train volunteer ambulance drivers in as little as a day to keep the system running.

All the while, there is the

personal toll.

In a city like Ketchum — population 2,700 — the impact of so many people falling ill at once has been deeply personal.

“It’s not six degrees of separation,” Bradshaw said. “It’s one degree.”

There’s also the impact on livelihoods. Tourists may have brought the coronavirus to the region. But without them, the local economy falls apart.

Mason, the restaurant owner, was cleaning the kitchen at the Ketchum Grill by himself one recent afternoon, with only the occasional to-go order. This time of year, his three restaurants would normally be packed. But with so little food to serve, he has gone from about 80 employees to just 11.

“The numbers are drastic,” said Mason, who opened his first restaurant in the city 29 years ago.

“Right now, we’re losing money.

We’ll do what we can, but this can’t go on for months and months.”

Authorities say they do not know if the worst of the pandemic has passed or if it’s still to come.

But they say they are heartened by the fact that the community appears to be rallying together. Social distancing rules are being followed. People are volunteering to help. The tourists, everyone seems convinced, will one day return.

And each night, at 8 p.m., the region puts its own spin on a global phenomenon of breaking the isolation and thanking healthcare workers — not with pots and pans or cheers or a song. But with a howl.

“The whole valley,” Russell said, “lets out a giant wolf roar.” n

N ICK M IROFF

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he government’s emergency stockpile of respirator masks, gloves and other medical supplies is nearly exhausted because of the coronavirus outbreak, leaving the Trump administration and the states to compete for personal protective equipment in a freewheeling global marketplace rife with profiteering and pricegouging, according to Department of Homeland Security officials involved in the frantic acquisition effort.

As coronavirus hot spots flare from coast to coast, the demand for personal protective equipment (PPE) is both immediate and widespread, with health officials, hospital executives and governors saying that their shortages are critical and that health-care workers are putting their lives at risk while trying to help the surging number of patients.

Two DHS officials said the stores kept in the Department of Health and Human Services’ Strategic National Stockpile are nearly gone.

During a White House briefing, President Trump confirmed Wednesday that the stockpile is nearly depleted, telling reporters that his administration has sent supplies “directly to hospitals.”

“The stockpile was designed to respond to a handful of cities. It was never built or designed to fight a 50-state pandemic,” said a DHS official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to speak publicly about the stockpile. “This is not only a U.S. government problem. The supply chain for PPE worldwide has broken down, and there is a lot of price-gouging happening.”

Trump said during Tuesday’s White House briefing that the administration has nearly 10,000 ventilators on reserve and that authorities are ready to deploy the lifesaving equipment rapidly

to coronavirus hot spots in coming weeks. He also said large amounts of PPE were being shipped directly from manufacturers to hospitals. But the DHS officials said the stockpile has not been able to handle the load.

Hospitals and states face a real risk of running out of supplies, one of the officials said. “If you can’t protect the people taking care of us, it gets ugly.”

Several reports have documented a Wild West-style online marketplace for bulk medical supplies dominated by intermediaries and hoarders who are selling N95 respirator masks and other gear at huge markups.

Forbes reported that U.S. vendors have sold 280 million masks — mostly into the export market — and that U.S. states and local governments were outbid in the frenzy.

There are few signs the Trump administration is making efforts to stop the export shipments or seize the supplies for use in U.S. hospitals, despite statements from Attorney General William P. Barr that U.S. wholesalers hoarding masks and other supplies would get “a knock on your door.”

Governors have been pleading with federal authorities to ship more equipment and protective gear. Distribution of the supplies has happened unevenly, with some states saying they have received a fraction of the supplies they desperately need and some cities having received no assistance from their state governments.

Officials at the Federal Emergency Management Agency said the government had anticipated the Strategic National Stockpile would be exhausted, and the administration is moving swiftly to procure and distribute supplies.

“The federal government will exhaust all means to identify and attain medical and other supplies needed to combat the virus,” Janet Montesi, a FEMA spokeswoman, said in a statement. n

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The coronavirus pandemic

Taking flight from urban centers

BY M ARC F ISHER, P AUL S CHWARTZMAN AND B EN W EISSENBACH

B

ack home in Oakland, Calif., Lisa Pezzino and Kit Center built a life that revolved around music and the people who make it — the musicians who recorded on Pezzino’s small label and performed in places where Center rigged the lights and sound equipment.

Where they are now, deep in the redwood forest near Big Sur, 140 miles south along the California coast, there is mostly the towering silence of isolation. A tiny cabin, an outdoor kitchen, just one neighbor. This is life in the flight from the virus.

They left town with four days of clothing and every intention of coming right home. And then the new rules kicked in, and state officials urged people to stay inside. There would be no concerts, no musicians wandering by to plan a recording session. Pezzino, a civil engineer who can work remotely, and Center, whose rigging work definitely cannot be done from home, decided to stay put in the woods, indefinitely.

They joined the impromptu Great American Migration of 2020.

“The heartbeat of what we do is in gathering, the community of where we live,” Pezzino said.

“That’s what keeps me in the Bay Area. It’s certainly not the rent, which is crazy. When everything we do was canceled, my response was, ‘Gosh, then, can we go to the country?’ ” Even as most people stay close to home in this deeply disruptive time, millions have been on the move, a mass migration that looks urgent and temporary but might contain the seeds of a wholesale shift in where and how Americans live. College students and young adults are on the interstates, heading home to repopulate their parents’ empty nests.

Middle-aged people have been heading to their parents’ retirement communities.

From beaches and resort towns to mountain cabins to rural family homesteads, places far from

Melina Mara/The Washington Post

Virus spurs migration to second homes, rural areas and resort towns densely packed cities are drawing people eager to escape from infection hot spots. But virus fugitives often are running into fierce opposition on their routes, including Florida’s effort to block New Yorkers from joining their relatives in the Sunshine State, a police checkpoint keeping outsiders from entering the Florida Keys, and several coastal islands closing bridges to try to keep the coronavirus at bay.

As President Trump’s administration develops a national ranking of counties as high-, mediumor low-risk for the spread of the virus, people in search of relative safety — and perhaps some paying work — are expanding existing trends away from expensive, crowded cities and toward small

towns and rural areas.

“The movement we’re seeing now is not just a reaction to one pandemic,” said Joel Kotkin, who studies how and why people move and wrote about the “Coming Age of Dispersion” at newgeography.com. “There will be a longer impact, an acceleration of the process that was already starting.

The work-at-home trend was already building, the small towns were already becoming much more cosmopolitan, with more and better coffee places and restaurants, and the big cities were already becoming prohibitively expensive.”

Pezzino is not giving up on her city home, but her forced sojourn into the country has her thinking about a changed future: “My

Lisa Pezzino and Kit Center look at a rainbow over the Pacific Ocean and Big Sur, Calif., mountains after escaping the Bay Area.

heart remains in Oakland, but this experience brings up really hard questions. It could be that the restaurants and bars don’t survive and a lot of artists who bartend to make ends meet won’t have those options, and then where is the art and music scene that keeps me in Oakland?”

No one expects cities to completely empty out, but some businesses undoubtedly will look back on this time of enforced work-from-home policies and figure that maybe they do not need to spend as much on pricey downtown office space. And some of the cultural amenities that drew people to cities during the past generation will struggle to return, having been damaged by this spring’s economic paralysis and

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The coronavirus pandemic by a new wariness about large gatherings.

“You’ll still have urban centers,” Kotkin said. “But they’ll be less intense and more dispersed.

You’ll no longer have to choose between unaffordable, overcrowded cities and incredibly boring countryside. There will be a more attractive middle ground.”

Already, the arrival of urban emigres — whether temporarily or long term — has raised alarms in many vacation communities.

In Bethany Beach, Del., police posted a plea on Facebook, begging people not to drive out to their summer homes and not to rent temporary housing: “Although this area is awesome, we have limited hospitalization facilities that cannot accommodate a rise in potential illnesses.”

“People are leaving populated areas, and they’re coming to their second homes here,” said Paul Kuhns, the mayor of Rehoboth Beach, Del., a resort town with about 1,500 year-round residents, but where the summer weekend population can soar above 25,000.

“It’s very difficult to tell people not to go to their second home — they have no problem reminding me that they pay taxes — but my big fear is, we’re going to be overwhelmed because our medical facilities are very limited,” he said.

At the Polo Club, a gated community in Boca Raton, Fla., recent days have seen an influx of Northerners, especially from the hardhit New York metro area — a reversal of the usual traffic this time of year, when snowbirds head back north, said Joel Rosenberg, a physician who heads the club’s emergency preparedness task force.

“They’re bringing in extended family to get away from the virus, and we’re asking them to maintain a 14-day quarantine,” he said.

“There’s no legal way we can force them, but we’re asking, really imploring.”

As the threat of the virus intensified last week, Danette Denlinger Brown, 54, hoped to relocate from Williamsburg, Va., to North Carolina’s Outer Banks, where she and her husband own a second home. But as she prepared to leave, she learned that North Carolina police had blocked the Wright Brothers Memorial Bridge connecting the mainland to the

Top: Pezzino brushes her teeth March 25 at the cabin she and her partner, Kit Center, migrated to in California’s redwood forest in Big Sur. Above: Center works on enhancing their living space. Pezzino and Center decided to stay put in the woods, indefinitely.

barrier island. Only year-round residents could cross, a restriction county officials said was necessary to stop migrating families from overwhelming the area’s only hospital, a 20-bed facility.

Brown, who owns a concrete company with her husband and planned to work from their waterfront house, said she has a compromised immune system and would feel safer in the more remote location. The decision to bar second-home owners was “very underhanded,” she said. “Everyone worked hard for their second home and should not be punished for having one.”

Stay in the city?

Economic downturns have a way of altering people’s decisions about where and how to live.

American history is a story of movement toward cities. But a shock to the system can reverse that trend: During the Great Depression of the 1930s, as factories shuttered, many people left cities to be closer to cheaper housing, work and relatives.

But urbanist Richard Florida, who famously predicted the rush of college graduates to big cities with concentrations of jobs in

tech, the arts and allied fields, said the pandemic is unlikely to reverse the urbanization trend.

“Look back at the history of 20th-century pandemics, and they have not budged the fundamental force of urbanization,” he said. “What followed the 1918 flu pandemic was the Roaring ’20s, which sparked a decade of great city building.”

Some affluent Americans might abandon city life, Florida said: Rich New Yorkers, for example, “are going back to the Hamptons, and older people who are scared of things like viruses are less likely to have that Fifth Avenue apartment.” But that “temporary reset” will lead, he said, to “a period when urban real estate is slightly more affordable.” That could breathe new life into cities that had been suffering from crushingly high housing prices.

Cities could evolve to adapt to public concerns about crowding — think more open space and wider sidewalks — but rural broadband and health care have a long way to go before remote areas can compete with cities, Florida said.

In Seattle, the first major U.S. city hit hard by the coronavirus, the lure of remote work at second homes or in the spare bedrooms of relatives who live in the Cascades quickly collided with the reality of limited rural broadband. Then, as a perceived influx of virus refugees into mountain, coastal and island towns sparked a backlash from full-time residents, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D) issued stricter stay-at-home orders.

Kevin and Julia Piasecki have owned a home in Mazama, Wash., since 2012. When the virus hit and Kevin, 51, took leave from his physical therapy job and Julia, 47, began working from home for the large pharmaceutical company where she is a research scientist, the couple plotted an extended getaway.

But they had to abandon the plan when they realized their connection to work would be iffy. “We don’t have reliable Internet in Mazama, and now that there’s more people hunkering down,” the resource is even less certain, Kevin said.

The Piaseckis dream of moving to the country full time, but the pandemic has given them newfound appreciation for their 100-

KLMNO Weekly

year-old house in Seattle with a view of Mt. Rainier.

“I complain about the traffic, pollution and crowded trailheads,” Kevin said. But “it’s easy to take Seattle’s health care for granted.”

Health care was also a consideration for Seattle residents John and Barbara O’Halloran, who escaped from the city to a woodframe cabin they own in Mazama on 107 acres abutting a national forest.

“We can hear the Methow River when the windows are open,” John said. “It’s remote, beautiful and frankly where you want to be in a pandemic.”

The couple went there in early March to catch the end of crosscountry ski season, with coronavirus in the back of their minds.

“We came prepared to spend some indefinite period of time,” he said.

But when John, 65, suffered a ski injury in Telluride, Colo., in January, the local clinic had no ultrasound machine. He had to drive two hours to assess his injury. “It was a wake-up call that health care is really important, but it’s uneven across the U.S.,” he said.

It’s a risk they’ve decided to take, even though they would have to travel 90 minutes from their cabin to a small hospital if the virus hits them.

Amid the chaos in many big cities, getting away still remains attractive to those who can find a way out.

Michael Zinder, 66, a lawyer, and his wife, Charlotte, decamped from their Manhattan apartment to their weekend retreat in Long Island’s Hamptons beach community in mid-March. They brought groceries and plan to stay as long as social distancing is the order of the day. Zinder can work remotely, and he figures the rural setting makes infection far less likely.

“In the city, I’m in an apartment building,” he said. “I can’t even go out for groceries, there are so many people. There’s a good chance they’ll be in the elevator or the lobby. Here, I’m less likely to come in contact with anyone.”

Zinder has noticed complaints in the local media about virus refugees from the city consuming limited rural resources, but no one has expressed any hostility to him. n

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China cautiously begins its comeback BY

A NNA F IFIELD

A

fter 10 weeks confined to their apartments, unable to exercise, shop for groceries or walk their dogs, Wuhan residents are emerging into the daylight.

The subway and intercity trains are running again. Shopping malls and even the Tesla store are reopening. State-owned companies and manufacturing businesses are turning on their lights, with others to follow.

“I’ve been indoors for 70 days.

Today is the first time that I came outside,” one woman who ventured into a mall last week told local television. “I feel as if I have been separated from the outside world for ages.”

Wuhan’s airport is due to reopen this week, and residents will be allowed to leave the city for the first time since it was locked down Jan. 23 to control the deadly coronavirus that originated there.

China’s leaders say the country has largely won the battle against its outbreak, reporting each day that domestic transmissions are negligible or nonexistent. The gradual reopening of parts of Hubei province — and now of Wuhan, the provincial capital — is testament to that.

But winning the war is proving to be a tougher proposition. That involves not only preventing a second wave of coronavirus infections but also restarting the economy. It is becoming increasingly clear that officials cannot achieve both things at once.

“These obviously come into conflict, because to prevent the spread of the virus, both from overseas and from unrecorded cases, China needs to maintain some kind of social distancing measures,” said Neil Thomas, a senior researcher at the China-focused MacroPolo think tank in Chicago. “These are going to dampen demand from consumers and limit the operation of factories, the service industry and the transportation networks.”

Chinese authorities are discovering that allowing people — even those without fevers who are

Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

The nation weighs an economic reboot against risk of new infections wearing surgical masks and are doused in hand sanitizer — to get too close to each other risks a new rise in infections. Recent media reports have focused on “silent carriers,” and studies have found that as many as one-third of people infected with the coronavirus show delayed or no symptoms.

“The possibility of a new round of infections remains relatively high,” National Health Commission spokesman Mi Feng said last Sunday.

Communist Party organizations must “grasp the prevention and control of the epidemic situation with one hand, and grasp the resumption of work and production with the other,” the official CPC News declared Monday. Party outlets have ranked controlling

the virus and stopping a second wave of infections above the need to restart the economy.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping is clearly concerned about the economic impact of a nationwide standstill.

Xi visited the huge Ningbo port and factories in Zhejiang, a hub for exports and a province he once governed, over the previous weekend to promise that the government would help businesses “recover in the soonest manner.”

Most economists forecast a sharp slump in China’s growth rate in the first quarter, with some predicting the first contraction since 1976. Still, at a recent Politburo meeting in Beijing, party leaders signaled further support for the economy, and reiterated

A woman passes drinks on Tuesday over a barricade in Wuhan built to control entry and exit at a residential compound. City residents are now being allowed to leave their homes under certain conditions.

their goal of 6 percent growth for the year as a whole.

But efforts to kick-start the economy are not going smoothly.

Despite the gradual reopening of Wuhan, things are still far from normal for the city of 11 million.

Officials say that 2,535 people died there during the outbreak, while about 2,500 people remain hospitalized.

People are allowed out of their residential complexes only if they have a return-to-work pass issued by their employer, and only if the government-issued health code on their cellphone glows green — not orange or red — to show that they are healthy and cleared for travel. Residents report that some complexes deemed infection-free have quietly lost that

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KLMNO Weekly

Crisis opens door for a power grab LOVEDAY MORRIS

In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been accused of carrying out what he Hungarian parliacritics have dubbed a “coronament has handed the virus coup” to remain leader country’s populist and delay his impending court prime minister, Viktor proceedings. Security agencies Orban, the power to govern have also been ordered to track unchallenged for as long as he users’ data without their consees fit, a move rights groups sent. said effectively suspends deRodrigo Duterte, president mocracy in the European Union of the Philippines, failed to member state in the name of convince lawmakers to give fighting the novel coronavirus. him the authority to take over The “coronavirus bill,” allows private businesses this past Orban to rule by decree and month. But even the emergenbypass the national assembly. It cy powers he has been granted was passed despite opposition have raised concerns given his efforts to attach an expiration past record of flouting the rule date. The law also punishes of law. those who “distort” or publish While expansive emergency “false” information on the outmeasures in countries such as break with five years in jail.

Britain, France and ItThe government has aly may have an end said that the emergendate before they must cy powers are necesgain parliamentary sary to fight the outapproval for extenbreak, but political ansions, the lifting of alysts say they have checks and balances questions about on democracies needs whether Orban will reto be closely monilinquish them when tored, rights activists the health crisis subsay. sides. Hungary has “In states of emer447 coronavirus cases Viktor Orban gency, there may be a and 15 deaths, accordneed to temporarily derogate ing to Johns Hopkins Universifrom certain rights and procety data. dures but any such measures “He is using this crisis to need to be temporary, proporfurther increase his power,” tionate and absolutely necessaid András Bíró-Nagy, the disary from a public health perrector of the Budapest-based spective,” said Lydia Gall, an Policy Solutions think tank.

Eastern Europe researcher “The Hungarian prime minister with Human Rights Watch. enjoys the situation where he “Vaguely formulated provican act as a captain in a crisis. I sions, as can be seen in the don’t see him giving up these state-of-emergency legislation powers again easily.” adopted, do not fulfill those He pointed to the fact that criteria and certainly not when Orban, leader of the right-wing they are set for an indefinite anti-immigration Fidesz party, period of time,” she added. still holds emergency powers The vote by Hungary’s parintroduced in 2016 to deal with liament effectively leaves the the migrant crisis.

Orban administration free to Orban does not stand alone pass any type of decree it sees in being accused of a coronavifit, she said. “We will have to rus power grab amid concerns wait and see how the governthat leaders with authoritarian ment will use this unlimited tendencies could exploit the power.” n current crisis.

BY

T Aly Song/Reuters

Volunteers in protective suits disinfect a jewelry store at a shopping complex Tuesday in Wuhan, as the city struggles to return to normalcy.

status, without explanation.

In the malls that opened last week, people must stand five feet apart on escalators, and clothes that customers have tried on must be sprayed with disinfectant. Subway passengers must wear masks and sit two seats apart; footage on state media showed near-deserted cars and stations.

“They’re trying to turn the industrial engines back on as quickly as they can,” said Ryan Hass, a China expert at the Brookings Institution. “But it’s a bit of a challenge because 60 percent of the Chinese economy is the service sector. And even if they wanted people to go to movie theaters and restaurants right now, I don’t think there’s a lot of demand.”

While Wuhan struggles to return to normalcy, authorities have reinstated restrictions elsewhere.

Small businesses — from karaoke bars in the northern city of Shenyang to Internet cafes in the southwestern metropolis of Chengdu — that tentatively reopened in early March have been ordered to close.

Employees rushed to get back to Moon Village, a karaoke joint in Chengdu, last weekend and enjoyed a celebratory drink together. The parlor’s social media pages featured photos of disinfecting procedures.

It wasn’t open even a day before local authorities told it to shut its doors.

Some 600 movie theaters that had reopened after a two-month shutdown — out of 70,000 nationwide that were ordered to close at the end of January, before what should have been the biggest box-

office week of the year — have been abruptly ordered to go dark.

Indoor attractions such as Madame Tussauds and the landmark Oriental Pearl Tower in Shanghai, and even pavilions in scenic mountain attractions, have also been told to close.

Chinese authorities have not spelled out reasons for these closures, but analysts such as Thomas say they underline the fear of new infections and the long-term impact that could have on the economy.

This U-turn has been accompanied by other sudden changes, including a ban on foreigners entering China and limited inbound flights for Chinese nationals. The number of flights arriving in the country is less than 2 percent of normal.

“It’s a difficult calculation: public health risk versus economic risk,” said Ryan Manuel, managing director of Official China, a consultancy specializing in China’s domestic political environment.

But it is a calculation that other countries, including Italy, Spain and the United States, will have to make.

“Everyone will need to come up with an exit strategy,” said Alicia Garcia Herrero, chief Asia-Pacific economist at Natixis, a French investment bank.

For now, she said, Chinese leaders should not worry about getting the economy back to normal.

Domestic demand is low, and external demand is even lower, given the coronavirus’s rampage across the world’s largest economies. n

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Opinions

What happens when both parents test positive Anne Kornblut a former Washington Post editor and reporter, is head of news curation at Facebook. This essay was adapted from two posts that originally appeared on her Facebook page.

Testing positive. That’s what everyone now calls it.

That’s how I told people when I got the news I had been diagnosed with the coronavirus two weeks ago.

It’s what my husband gestured — making a plus sign — when he got the same call five days later. ¶ What happens when both parents of young children test positive? ¶ When I got the call, my family wasn’t home. When they walked in the door, my children, ages 7 and 8, rushed toward me. I had to tell them to back away, while informing them that this scary thing upending the entire planet was now inside our house.

Inside their mom.

My daughter cried and asked if I would get better. I couldn’t hug her. After the Santa Clara (Calif.) County health department called to tell me to stay away from everyone, including my children, my son wrote an account of it for our home newspaper.

“Anne Kornblut has the coronavirus but do not worry it is not the bad kind,” he wrote on the front page.

“Please note that you should not be within ten feet of Anne.”

I asked the health department what we should do if my husband received the same diagnosis, which he eventually did. “We haven’t had that scenario yet,” the public health nurse said. It was early days in this pandemic.

That scenario arrived for us, as it now has for so many.

We are among the lucky. We have not been hospitalized, nor are we gravely ill. Over the weeks of tests and quarantine, we’ve been showered with love from friends and still received paychecks. Our kids seem to

be fine. And they are both with us.

But the double diagnosis has hit us in unexpected ways.

The medical advice has been murky. Should we test our two kids? No, the doctors said. You should assume your kids have it, or already did.

Does that mean we can all hold each other, and be together in the same room?

No, the doctors said. You don’t want to give your family more virus — more “viral load,” as they put it — and make them sicker. And absolutely no one can come or go from the house. Can I take off the mask and gloves?

Again, no.

I gave up on the mask anyway — slowly at first, then increasingly as it became clear that the kids needed normalcy more than protection. Jon and I kept our distance from each other and from them. But we gave occasional quick hugs.

How do you tell kids of that age that everything will be fine, and their parents won’t both die, without some little touch?

We set the bar at surviving.

We have taken turns with the

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kids. We’ve begged them to put themselves to bed. We try not to seem sick, even though we take one step forward, another back. I went from no fever to a low fever. An odd headache keeps recurring, one that feels like a kind of brain fog. I lost my sense of smell; Jon did not.

He remains fatigued, but his fever is gone. We both need naps.

And yet. My emotional balance scale — with fear and sadness on one side, countered by gratitude on the other — is tipping heavily in the direction of gratitude.

The outpouring from our family, friends, neighbors and total strangers has made us feel loved like no other time since moving to California almost six years ago. Several people have dropped off groceries, including impossible-to-find sanitizing wipes. One made homemade beef stew; another managed to arrange a giant matzoh ball soup delivery. A group of friends gave us a gift certificate to a local toy store that delivers.

Someone anonymously sent us socks (please tell me if it was you). Someone else sent books.

And yet. The disparity between our situation and what is happening outside our walls is unthinkable. Why am I improving every day, while a 36-year-old school principal in Brooklyn died?

The arbitrariness of who’s getting help and who isn’t, compounded by the great imbalance between who can eat this week and who won’t, is overwhelming.

Every night, I have dreams about infecting other people.

I’m in a movie theater, sharing popcorn with someone, when I suddenly remember I have the coronavirus and tell the other person. Or I’m in a meeting, borrowing someone’s pen, when I tell them I’m sick.

Night after night.

Last Wednesday, I left the house for the first time in 13 days and took a walk. It’ll be at least another week and a half, and probably longer, before we’re out of quarantine, but doctors said we can go outdoors if we stay far from others. I kept 40 feet away from the nearest pedestrian. Even then, I worried about the wind carrying my germs. By the time I returned home, I had to sleep. n