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Living without a living wage At the ever-growing bottom of the American economy, a low-wage worker becomes a minimum-wage activist PAGE PAGE12 8
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KLMNO Weekly
Politics
Trump’s go-it-alone approach tested BY T OLUSE O LORUNNIPA AND A NNE G EARAN
A
s a viral pandemic has spread across continents with a severity and deadliness that world leaders say demands a global response, President Trump has increasingly turned inward. He has imposed travel restrictions on one-fourth of the world’s population while criticizing other nations’ response efforts, refused to meet with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, attacked his handpicked Federal Reserve chairman and defied the warnings of his own public health experts. His handling of the crisis, including a surprise decision to restrict travel from Europe, is drawing criticism at home and abroad, with leaders warning that Trump’s go-it-alone approach is doing harm to an already fraught situation. German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said that reasons “less than factual” appeared to have played a role in Trump’s decision-making. “We can’t adequately meet this challenge — not even within the USA — when decisions being made are garnished with blame,” Maas said in an emailed statement. Before announcing the travel restrictions in an Oval Office address to the nation Wednesday, Trump compared the death rate in the United States positively with other places where the coronavirus has been spreading, bluntly criticizing U.S. allies as they face a debilitating crisis. “The European Union failed to take the same precautions and restrict travel from China and other hot spots,” he said. “As a result, a large number of new clusters in the United States were seeded by travelers from Europe.” Trump’s approach reflects his us-against-them mind-set, tendency to assign blame and combative view of geopolitics — characteristics that have only been amplified by the global crisis, said Russell Riley, a presidential
Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post
Amid global pandemic, president’s critics warn that isolationism will only harm fraught situation historian at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. “It is a persistent, enduring and probably irreversible feature of this president that he’s going to approach a problem on his own, and will rise or fall based on his ability to succeed in doing that,” he said, describing Trump’s strategy as a “recipe for a disastrous exercise in leadership.” The White House defended the president’s leadership, arguing that Trump has been engaging with world leaders about the coronavirus for several weeks. “As the President said last night, we are using the full power of the federal government and the private sector to protect the American people,” White House spokesman Judd Deere said in a statement. “It is because of the President’s leadership and relationships that he has brought together government and private industry for unprecedented collaboration to curb the spread of the Coronavirus, expand testing capacities, and expedite vaccine
development.” Trump, who called the novel coronavirus a “foreign virus” and repeatedly said it was “not our fault,” has focused more on its cosmopolitan origins than its rapid spread within the country as Americans transfer it to one another. The outbreak has advanced within the country’s borders amid a lack of adequate testing, disjointed messaging and political brinkmanship that even Trump administration officials acknowledge have hampered the public health response. Trump’s isolationism has extended to the domestic political sphere, where the president has refused to speak with Pelosi (DCalif.) because of his anger over his impeachment despite her leading role in determining what kind of emergency stimulus package Congress will produce. Trump skipped the annual bipartisan St. Patrick’s Day luncheon hosted by Pelosi on Thursday, becoming the first president to miss the event since George W.
President Trump delivers a televised national address about the novel coronavirus pandemic on Wednesday. He also announced a travel ban between U.S. and most of Europe.
Bush shortly before the war with Iraq in 2003. Trump has dispatched Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to work with Pelosi on a major relief bill, but a bipartisan agreement remained elusive late in the week. As recently as this past week, Trump cited the virus as added reason to build a physical wall across the southern U.S. border. Trump has repeatedly praised his Jan. 31 ban on most travel from China as evidence of forward-thinking leadership. Fauci and other public health officials have credited Trump for his early decision to restrict travel from China, a country of 1.4 billion, saying the move bought the United States time to prepare. As he has quizzed his aides about the number of coronavirus cases in the United States, he has also asked how the quantity compares to other countries. The ban covers some European countries, including hard-hit Italy, but not others. From a public health perspective, travel bans have limited effect once a virus becomes so widespread, said Harvard University epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch. “The travel ban seems an unnecessary assault on the economy, but more concerning is that it is the centerpiece of a policy that has inadequately addressed the urgent need to interrupt local transmission in the U.S.,” he said, highlighting the lack of testing by public health labs. Trump’s decision to ban travel from some European countries but not others opened him up to political attacks from Democrats seeking to oust him from office in the November elections. “Travel restrictions based on favoritism and politics — rather than risk — will be counterproductive,” former vice president Joe Biden said in a speech Thursday. “This disease could impact every nation and any person on the planet. And we need a plan about how we are going to aggressively manage it here at home.” n
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Politics Analysis
KLMNO Weekly
How Democrats can take the Senate The party is 4 seats away from a majority, but the races it faces are not easy
BY
A MBER P HILLIPS
D
emocrats are doing everything they can to position themselves to win back the U.S. Senate. It still might not be enough. On Monday, term-limited Montana governor and former 2020 presidential candidate Steve Bullock announced he is running for Senate there, putting up Democrats’ strongest candidate to take this seat from Republicans. The same happened in Colorado when John Hickenlooper, that state’s former governor and presidential candidate, ran for Senate. Those two well-known names have the best chance of probably anyone in their party to win these Senate seats for Democrats. Democrats also are making serious plays to unseat Republicans in Arizona, Maine, North Carolina and, to a lesser extent, Georgia. That’s a lot of opportunity for them to win back the majority for the first time since 2014. But the challenge for Democrats comes from the fact they are coming at a deficit of around five seats and the tough races above aren’t guaranteed to provide them five victories. It’s more likely they will lose at least one 2020 race, Alabama, than win the others on this list. Let’s run through the math to explain how I get to the number five. Today, without any elections, Democrats are four seats away from the majority. Even though Democrats are at 47 seats to Republicans’ 53 — a deficit of three seats — the number is really four without the White House, since in a tie vote, the vice president can break it for his party. They need to pick up four seats to win the majority. Let’s make that five if Sen. Doug Jones (D-Ala.) loses his first reelection in November. In case you need a refresher on why his loss is a distinct possibility: He won in a special election in 2017 against a flawed candidate, Roy Moore, who was accused by more than half a dozen women of predatory behavior when they were teenagers and
Which Senate seats are in play in 2020? Democrats need to pick up four seats to gain a majority in the Senate. Democrat-held seat
Potentially competitive
Republican-held seat
NH
WA MT OR
ID WY
No Senate election in 2020
NV CA
ME
ND MN
SD
AZ
CO
OK TX
AK
PA IN OH WV VA MO KY NC TN AR SC MS AL GA* LA IL
KS
NM
NY
MI
IA
NE UT
WI
MA RI NJ DE
FL
HI
23 Republican seats in play
12 Democratic seats in play
2 potentially competitive
8 potentially competitive
*Both Senate seats in Ga. will be on the ballot, but it’s possible only one is competitive. THE FIX
he was in his 30s. Now, Jones is running for reelection in one of the most pro-Trump states in the nation after having voted to convict the president in the impeachment trial. After a primary a few weeks ago, we know he’ll be running against one of two strong Republican candidates, former Auburn University football coach Tommy Tuberville or former senator Jeff Sessions, whose former seat Jones holds in the Senate. Much less on the defensive for Democrats is Sen. Gary Peters, who is running for his first reelection in Michigan. It’s a state Democrats need to win to take the White House, meaning they’ll be putting a lot of resources there. So far, nonpartisan Senate watchers and some early polls favor Peters over Republican candidate John James. Where else could Democrats pick up five seats for the majority? Let’s look at the possibilities, which I’ve broken down into three categories: Republican-held seats that are good opportunities for Democrats 1. Colorado: With Hickenlooper in the race, Democrats have a better-than-average chance to knock
off Sen. Cory Gardner (R), who has watched the state he impressively won six years ago become more blue, while his supporters become more supportive of Trump. His decision to bridge that divide? Stick with Trump and hope it’s enough. 2. Arizona: Democratic candidate Mark Kelly is a former astronaut and a gun-control activist. (His wife is former Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot in the head.) He’s trying to unseat Sen. Martha McSally (R), who lost her Senate race in 2018, then was appointed by the governor to the state’s other Senate seat after John McCain’s death. This election, technically a special one to continue to fill McCain’s seat, comes as Arizona could be tiptoeing toward purple. Republican-held seats that are true toss-ups 3. Maine: Can Democrats do something that has eluded them for decades and unseat Sen. Susan Collins (R)? State House Speaker Sara Gideon is putting front and center the fact that Collins has been the swing vote in several high-profile fights (like Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh and Trump’s impeachment trial)
and ultimately decided to stick with Republicans and Trump. 4. North Carolina: Sen. Thom Tillis (R) is running for his first reelection in a swing state while embracing Trump. Democrats have nominated former state senator and Army veteran Cal Cunningham, a centrist Democrat. Tillis has struggled with how to please Trump supporters and Trump critics, doing a complete 180 on whether to support Trump taking military money to build his U.S.-Mexico border wall. Republican-held seats Democrats will need a strong turnout in November to win 5. Georgia: Both Georgia Senate seats are open this year, after Republican Johnny Isakson retired. Sen. David Perdue (R) also is running for his first reelection. Isakson’s replacement, Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R), has a difficult road ahead given how new she is. The higherprofile Democratic candidates are in the race to challenge Perdue. Rep. Douglas A. Collins (R) is running for the Senate seat Loeffler holds, which could risk splitting the Republican vote in that state’s all-on-one-ballot primary. 6. Montana: Bullock is a big name in the state, having won statewide three times. But Trump won it by more than 20 points in 2016, which may help Sen. Steve Daines (R) in his first Senate reelection. Overall, Democrats’ path to the majority comes with a pretty big to-do list: They need to win in Colorado and Arizona. They probably need to unseat a 22-year incumbent in Maine. Down South, they have to win in either North Carolina or Georgia, or both. And they need to win the White House for extra reassurance. It’s possible Democrats do some but not all of those tasks and end up a few seats shy of the majority, for the fourth election in a row. Democrats say it’s still early and they’re doing what they need to do to expand the map and put more seats in play. n
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Nation
The future of the coronavirus BY
W ILLIAM W AN
A
s stock markets plunge, travel is disrupted and new coronavirus infections are diagnosed across the United States, one question on everyone’s mind is how the outbreak is going to end. No one knows for sure, but virologists say there are clues from similar outbreaks. Here are three scenarios: 1. Health officials control coronavirus through strict public health measures
When severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) hit Asia in 2002, it was pretty scary — with a fatality rate of about 10 percent and no drugs shown to be effective against it. (The current coronavirus by comparison has a fatality rate that has been estimated ranging from less than 1 to 3.4 percent.) But within months, SARS was brought under control, and for the most part stamped out, by international cooperation and strict, old-school public health measures such as isolation, quarantine and contact tracing. This would be an ideal outcome. But the difference is that SARS had more severe symptoms than the current coronavirus, so people went to the hospital shortly after being infected. Cases of coronavirus will be harder to catch and isolate, said Stuart Weston, a postdoctoral virologist at University of Maryland. Weston is one of a small group of researchers who have received samples of the coronavirus and are studying it. Weston and other experts warn the outbreak in the United States and other countries is more widespread than tracked because many people with mild symptoms don’t know they have been infected.
2. Coronavirus hits less developed countries, and things get worse before they get better
One of the grim lessons from the 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak in West Africa is how an epidemic
Ted S. Warren/Associated Press
Past epidemics, including SARS, H1N1 and Ebola, point to three possible outcomes can grow when it hits countries with weak health infrastructures. This is why the World Health Organization and others have been preparing countries in subSaharan Africa for the coronavirus, even though few cases so far have been reported there. Compared to the coronavirus, Ebola was less contagious and transmitted mainly by bodily fluids. The coronavirus can be transmitted in coughed and sneezed respiratory droplets that linger on surfaces. And yet Ebola infected more than 28,000 people and caused more than 11,000 deaths. Ebola is more lethal, and shortages of staff and supplies, poverty, delays by leaders and distrust of government exacerbated the outbreak. WHO leaders have been urging countries to prepare. On Friday, the organization raised its assessment of coronavirus to the highest level. “This is a reality check for every government on the planet: Wake up. Get ready. This virus may be on its way, and you need to
be ready,” said Michael Ryan, WHO’s director of health emergencies. “To wait, to be complacent, to be caught unawares at this point, it’s really not much of an excuse.” 3. The new coronavirus spreads so widely, it becomes a fact of life
This is in essence what happened with the 2009 H1N1 outbreak, also called swine flu. It spread quickly, eventually to an estimated 11 to 21 percent of the global population. The WHO declared it a pandemic, and there was widespread fear. H1N1 turned out to be milder than initially feared, causing little more than runny noses and coughs in most people. And H1N1 is now so commonplace, it’s simply seen as a part of the seasonal flus that come and go every year around the globe. Early estimates on the fatality rate for H1N1 were much higher than the roughly 0.01 to 0.03 percent it turned out to be. Still,
Workers from a Servpro disaster recovery team enter Life Care Center in Kirkland, Wash., to disinfect the facility on Wednesday. The nursing home is at the center of the coronavirus outbreak in Washington state.
the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that H1N1 killed 12,469 people in the United States during that firstyear period from 2009 to 2010, infected 60.8 million cases and caused 274,304 hospitalizations. The true number is hard to ascertain because many who die of flu-related causes aren’t tested to see whether it was H1N1 or another flu strain. As context, the seasonal flu has killed at least 18,000 people in the United States so far this season, according to the CDC. H1N1 is a particularly good parallel, epidemiologists say, because while it had a lower fatality rate than SARS or MERS, it was deadlier because of how infectious and widespread it became. Not to be alarmist, but another possible parallel might be the 1918 Spanish flu, which had a 2.5 percent fatality rate, eerily close to what’s estimated for the coronavirus. CDC calls Spanish flu “the deadliest pandemic flu virus in human history,” because it infected roughly one third of the world’s population and killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide. Spanish flu was deadly to young and old, while coronavirus has proved to be most lethal to the elderly and left young people relatively unscathed. Florian Krammer, a virologist specializing in influenzas, noted that the world was vastly different in 1918. “We didn’t have the tools to diagnose diseases or antibiotics to fight secondary infections. Hospitals back then were places where you went to die, not to get treatment. And in 1918, the world was at war. And a lot of the people infected were soldiers stuck in trenches,” said Krammer, of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “That’s hopefully not how this is going to play out.” A few more key things will affect the coronavirus endgame
If the coronavirus does indeed become ubiquitous like H1N1, it will be crucial to develop a vaccine. After the 2009 outbreak, experts developed an H1N1 vac-
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World
Weekly
Children’s resistance to the new disease may be key
cine that was included in flu shots people received in subsequent years. This helped protect especially vulnerable populations during following waves of infection. In the immediate future, antiviral drugs may help, and labs around the world are testing their effectiveness against the coronavirus. No one knows if the coronavirus will be affected by seasons like the flu, despite President Trump’s claims that it could “go away” in April with warmer temperatures. “We’re still learning a lot about the virus,” said WHO epidemiologist Maria Van Kerkhove. “Right now there’s no reason to think this virus would act differently in different climate settings. We’ll have to see what happens as this progresses.” Coronaviruses are zoonotic, meaning they spread from animals to humans. Experts believe
BY W ILLIAM W AN AND J OEL A CHENBACH
O
Roslan Rahman/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
SARS spread from bats to civet cats to humans. The deadly Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) in 2012 was probably transmitted from bats to camels to humans. With the coronavirus, no one knows what animals caused the current outbreak. And it’s a mystery scientists will need to solve to prevent it from repeating in the future. One prime suspect is an endangered creature called the pangolin that looks like a cross between an anteater and an armadillo and whose scales are trafficked illegally. “With SARS, once they figured out the animals responsible in China, they were able to start culling them from the live markets,” said Vineet Menachery, a virologist at University of Texas Medical Branch. “It’s like a burst water pipe. You have to find the source in order to shut it off.” n
KLMNO
Experts have not nailed down the animals responsible for transmitting the new coronavirus to humans, but they suspect the pangolin may have played a role.
ne of the few mercies of the coronavirus is that it leaves young children virtually untouched — a mystery virologists say may hold clues to how the virus works. In China, only 2.4 percent of reported cases were children and only 0.2 percent were children who got critically ill, according to the World Health Organization. China has reported no case of a young child dying of covid-19. Meanwhile, the new coronavirus has proved especially deadly on the other end of the age spectrum. The fatality rate in China for those over 80 is an estimated 21.9 percent, per the WHO. For ages 10 to 39, however, the fatality rate is roughly 0.2 percent, according to a separate study drawing on patient records of 44,672 confirmed cases. And fatalities and severe symptoms are almost nonexistent at even younger ages. That means the new coronavirus is behaving very differently from other viruses, like seasonal influenza, which are usually especially dangerous for the very young and very old. “With respiratory infections like this, we usually see a U-shaped curve on who gets hits hardest. Young children at one end of the U because their immune systems aren’t yet developed and old people at the other end because their immune systems grow weaker,” said Vineet Menachery, a virologist at the University of Texas. “With this virus, one side of the U is just completely missing.” Figuring out why children are so unaffected could lead to breakthroughs in understanding how and why the virus sickens and kills other age groups, said Frank Esper, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at Cleveland Clinic Children’s. Among the questions Esper and others are exploring: Is the severity of infection related to what patients were exposed to previously? Does it have to do with
Jaipal Singh/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
Schoolchildren wear protective masks as they return from school in Jammu, India, on March 7.
how our immune systems change with age? Or could it be due to pollution damage in the lungs accumulated over years? “Or maybe it has nothing to do with the virus and has to do with host, like underlying conditions in the lungs, diabetes or hypertension. After all, few 7-year-olds or newborns have hypertension,” said Esper who studies viral respiratory infections and new diseases. “Figuring out what’s at play here could be helpful in so many ways.” Previous coronavirus outbreaks have also mysteriously spared the young. No children died during the SARS outbreak in 2002, which killed 774 people. And few children developed symptoms from MERS, which has killed 858 since 2012. Some experts have floated a theory that because children are so heavily exposed to four other mild coronaviruses, which circulate every year and cause the common cold, that may give kids some kind of strengthened immunity. But many have doubts about that argument because adults catch the common cold coronaviruses too, and the immune systems of children — especially under the age of five — are underdeveloped, which should make them more vulnerable, not less.
“If it bears out that kids are less prone to infection, then I suspect there’s something more mechanical than immunological going on,” Esper said. “Something about the receptors in children’s bodies or their lungs is interfering with the virus’ ability to attach itself.” “It just shows you how much we don’t know about this virus,” said Stuart Weston, a virologist at the University of Maryland. “The focus now is on vaccines and treatment, but there are all these big questions we’re going to want to answer in the long-term.” So given all that, does it make sense to close schools? Because so few cases have been found in children, there’s been speculation children are simply less likely to get infected. But many epidemiologists suspect mild symptoms may simply be masking that children are getting infected at the same rates as adults. New data published last week by Chinese researchers showed authorities searching for coronavirus cases based on symptoms found lower rates in kids. But when they relied on contact tracing — testing people who come in contact with a confirmed case — children seemed to be getting infected at the same rate as adults. n
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World
Lessons from extreme lockdowns E MILY R AUHALA, W ILLIAM W AN AND G ERRY S HIH BY
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hina locked down megacities. Italy has put its entire populace into quarantine. Now New York’s governor has turned the town of New Rochelle into a “containment zone.” As the coronavirus continues its spread, officials are beginning to consider whether the United States should enact the type of large-scale, mandatory lockdowns touted by Beijing and praised at times by World Health Organization officials. The simple answer, according to experts, is no. But as the United States considers its next moves, there are lessons to be learned from what happened in China and other countries where cases are declining. Striking a balance with measures that are effective but not inordinate is critical, according to public health researchers who warn that extreme policies such as mandatory regionwide quarantines could run into ethical, legal and logistical problems, or even backfire. Instead, ramping up testing capacity, quickly isolating sick or suspected patients and introducing policies that limit public gatherings or require working from home have proved effective in China, Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea. “China’s most effective measures can be undertaken without violating human rights,” said Thomas J. Bollyky, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and director of its Global Health Program. Actions such as “suspending public transport, limiting public gatherings, preparing their health-care system, testing significant numbers. Those are all things we should be doing in the United States.” And for them to succeed, U.S. officials need to be radically transparent to win the public’s cooperation and trust. “It means our leaders being as truthful and honest as possible, including admitting mistakes and things we simply don’t know,” said Wilbur Chen, an infectious-dis-
Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Policies in countries such as China, Singapore can provide guidance on how to combat coronavirus ease physician at the University of Maryland. “The solution is not as simple as announcing a lockdown, because the second you do that here, you’re going to have people panicking and jumping into their cars, which is the exact opposite of what you’re trying to achieve.” “Lockdown” isn’t a legal or medical term, but public health experts have researched the effectiveness of “cordon sanitaires” — a term for a geographical barrier put in place to stop the spread of infectious disease. This is similar to what Italy has implemented in declaring the entire country a “red zone” in which public gatherings are banned and people can travel to, from and within Italy only if deemed necessary for work or an emergency. The containment zone set up in New Rochelle, N.Y., may not be considered cordon sanitaire because residents are still free to move around, but all public gatherings have been canceled. The effectiveness of such measures depends in part on how they are implemented, epidemi-
ologists say. On one end of the spectrum, some governments make lockdowns voluntary, relying on community compliance. On the other end, authorities enforce them with police patrols, fines and military-style checkpoints. China’s lockdowns landed squarely on the latter side. Beijing has faced stark criticism for first trying to conceal the outbreak, which started in December. This past week, national security adviser Robert O’Brien Jr. said China ignored “best practices” by censoring doctors and blocking foreign health experts, spurring the spread of the virus. During the week of Jan. 20, with tens of millions about to travel for the Lunar New Year holiday, Chinese officials began shutting down Wuhan and several nearby cities in an unprecedented quarantine effort. The World Health Organization (WHO) has said the world should be grateful for the measures, but scientists and public health experts
Empty roads in Wuhan, Hubei province, China, on Tuesday. Experts said Chinese officials’ decision to lock down Wuhan was not necessarily a game changer.
say that locking down Wuhan was not necessarily a game changer — and that it came at an unprecedented human and economic cost. Using disease transmission modeling, a study published in the journal Science found that China’s Jan. 23 ban on travel in and out of Wuhan slowed domestic spread by only three to five days because, by the time it was implemented, more cases had been diagnosed in other Chinese cities. The same modeling found that the travel ban slowed international spread by a matter of weeks but not enough to reduce the virus’s long-term effect — an important lesson for other governments as they determine next steps. “Real questions need to be asked about what impact the lockdown had on limiting supplies and health-care workers, inciting panic, overburdening hospitals, increasing transmissions by concentrating people into areas,” said Alexandra Phelan, a global health lawyer at Georgetown’s Center for Global Health Science and Security. The Chinese government’s sudden shift from denial to drastic measures also eroded public trust. Social media were flooded with a disorienting mix of rumor, real news and propaganda. Across rural China, villages barricaded themselves and tore up roads in fear and desperation. To hold the line, officials took extreme enforcement measures. In big cities, neighborhood officials locked frightened citizens inside their apartment compounds. Residents were allowed to walk a few steps beyond their compound gate to retrieve deliveries, but to venture further they needed to obtain a travel pass from volunteers sporting red arm bands. One Hangzhou resident, who did not want his named used because he feared official reprisal, said neighborhood officials locked his quarantined family inside their apartment with a padlock and only removed it days later after he complained that he would be at extreme risk in case of fire. “For this to work, we need a balance between health and civil liberties,” said Lawrence Gostin, a pro-
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U.S. move catches Europe by surprise BY J AMES M C A ULEY AND M ICHAEL B IRNBAUM
in Paris
Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters
A boy wearing a hat with a protective screen blows soap bubbles at a park in Daegu, South Korea, on Thursday. The nation reported only 131 new cases on Tuesday, compared to its peak of 909 on Feb. 29.
fessor of global health law at Georgetown University who also provides technical assistance to WHO. “We haven’t seen that balance.” Health experts say the United States has the enormous advantage of learning from painful experiences of other countries, including China. “The prime strategy for containing the virus has been quick diagnosis, quick isolation, quick treatment,” said Ivan Hung, chief of infectious diseases at the University of Hong Kong’s medical school. After a delayed initial response, Hung said, China did well by aggressively ramping up production of test kits, taking over hotels and school dormitories to quarantine suspected cases and building new facilities to isolate infected patients. Some of China’s efforts at “social distancing” seem to be effective. In cities like Beijing, some restaurants and cafes require diners to sit several feet away from each other. Supermarkets enforce a one-in, one-out policy; shoppers who are queuing outside must stand several feet away from each other. South Korea is also instructive. On Tuesday, it reported only 131 new cases compared to its peak of 909 on Feb. 29 — a sign its policies of widespread testing, rapid tracing and isolating the infected are having an effect. Hong Kong has also been able to hold the line through isolation, contact tracing — essentially, gathering information about people who come in contact with a confirmed case — and school closures.
Officials from WHO to Vice President Pence, who is leading the U.S. response, have touted Singapore as one of the best models to emulate. The Singaporean government reacted quickly with aggressive measures without resorting to lockdowns, instead focusing on tracking the virus. The government mounted enormous teams for contact tracing using law enforcement tools like surveillance footage and receipts to see where and who they had come into contact with — without consent if necessary. A study last month by epidemiologists at Harvard University suggested that if other countries worldwide had the testing and tracing capacity of Singapore, the number of confirmed cases would multiply by 2.8 times. The government also put teeth to its orders — more than some western democratic states might be comfortable with. Authorities, for example, charged a couple who lied about their travel history with a crime and revoked the residency of a man who broke his medical quarantine. Not everything that works in one country will work in others, perhaps especially the United States, noted Chen, the University of Maryland infection disease doctor. “This is a country that is built on individual rights and independence, and that’s a great thing. It also means there are real differences, including what we’re willing to tolerate from our government. I don’t think a China-style lockdown would work.” n
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f all the slights between Washington and Europe in recent years, the travel restrictions announced this past week by President Trump represented a blow an order of magnitude beyond previous disputes. In a short statement — rare in its directness — the European Union expressed only exasperation at the surprise move. “The Coronavirus is a global crisis, not limited to any continent and it requires cooperation rather than unilateral action,” the statement read, co-signed by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Charles Michel. “The European Union disapproves of the fact that the U.S. decision to impose a travel ban was taken unilaterally and without consultation.” The ire on Thursday from Brussels was another sign of just how little the two sides appear to be coordinating their response to the pandemic. European officials scrambled to play catch-up to understand the reasoning behind the ban. The U.S. Mission to the European Union declined to answer questions about how it was explaining the restrictions to European colleagues. The details of the travel restrictions confounded many European leaders and policymakers, underscoring the view that the decision was largely political. The ban on flights covered only the Schengen area, the European Union’s border-free travel zone, a 26-nation region that does not include Britain or Ireland. The European Union has been a regular target for Trump’s irritation, and he has praised Britain for quitting the bloc. But there are more cases of coronavirus in Britain than in many of the countries covered by the ban. Across the 26 nations hit by the ban, there were 21,080 active cas-
es of coronavirus as of Thursday morning, and 952 deaths, according to a database maintained by Johns Hopkins University. Italy was the locus of the pandemic, with more than half of the active cases — 10,590 — and the vast majority of deaths, 827. Britain had 430 active cases and eight deaths, while Ireland had 42 active cases and one death. Some in Europe wondered if Britain and Ireland were exempted because they contain Trumpowned properties. The decision appeared to confound even leaders of the British government and former U.S. homeland security officials, who said that scientific evidence did not support travel restrictions. Critics of the ban said travel restrictions — such as those imposed on China early in the crisis — no longer make sense given that coronavirus is now global. “With regard to flight bans, we are always guided by the science as we make our decisions here. The advice we are getting is that there isn’t evidence that interventions like closing borders or travel bans are going to have a material effect on the spread of the infections,” Rishi Sunak, Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, told the BBC. In his announcement, Trump specifically referred to what he called a “foreign virus” that “started in China and is now spreading throughout the world.” The move added to the sense that industrial powers were failing to work with each other to contain the virus, and might even be working against each other. Under previous presidents, the United States has often taken the lead in directing a coordinated global response to world challenges. Trump has sought to minimize the virus, undermine his scientific advisers and blame other countries for the pandemic. And he has also tangled with European countries for three years on issues of defense spending, climate change and trade. n
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Cover story
Day to day, surviving tip to tip A low-wage employee joins the movement for a $15 minimum wage as she and her family struggle to stay afloat ELI SASLOW in Durham, N.C. BY
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i there,” she said to a man wearing a neon yellow vest and hauling a large toolbox. “Are you interested in joining a movement for —” but he was already past her. She looked down the walkway and saw a woman in a hotel housekeeping apron talking on her phone. Sara smiled and stepped into her path. “Do you have a minute to talk about our poverty wages?” Sara asked, but the woman pointed to her phone and kept walking. Sara sat on a bench and lit a cigarette. She had spent nine hours that day waiting tables for what turned out to be $7.40 an hour including tips, and she rubbed her swollen ankles as she watched passengers transfer between a dozen city buses parked at the station. Construction workers wore hard hats on their way to the night shift, and fast-food workers in grease-stained uniforms carried bags of leftovers to take home. “The Road to Nowhere” was what some Durham residents had begun
calling the city’s bus system, because even at a time of historic employment and record wealth in the United States, low-wage workers remained stuck riding in circles around the ever-expanding bottom of the American economy, where half of the state’s workforce earned less than $15 an hour and pay was mostly stagnant. A woman in a KFC hat sat next to Sara on the bench and sifted through her purse for a bottle of Tylenol. Sara reached for her clipboard and stuck out her hand. “Hi. Hate to bother you,” she said. “We’re out here trying to organize workers who want to fight for decent pay.” The woman looked at the clipboard and shook her head. “I don’t have time for sign-up sheets or politics or none of that,” she said. “Me neither,” Sara said. She unzipped her coat to show the woman her Waffle House uniform. “I worked all day and made sixty-seven bucks,” she said. “I’ve never done anything like this, but what I’ve been doing isn’t working.” “Sorry,” the woman said, standing up to leave. “I got
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Photos by Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post
my hands full just doing the math on how to make it from today until tomorrow.” Sara had spent the past decade solving that same daily equation, trying to navigate the widening gap between a federal minimum wage of $2.13 for tipped workers that hadn’t gone up in 29 years and a cost of living that had more than doubled. She paid her rent in $20 increments to stave off eviction. She switched from one waitressing job to another for a 25-cent raise. The hopes she’d once had for her own life faded into the aspirations she had for her six children. Now the eldest of those children had been evicted from her first apartment. The next was beginning a low-wage job at Jiffy Lube. The third was in Raleigh working her way through community college. That left three children at home with Sara and her husband, Dee, who were so buried in their own mounting debt that, when a friend knocked on their door in January trying to form a union for disenfranchised workers, Sara had decided to take the first political action of her life. She
Opposite page: Sara walks in the dark to catch the first public bus of the day. Its timeliness, and lack of it, affects her day’s earning potential. Above: Sara joins Keenan Harton in protest at a rally by NC Raise Up outside a McDonald’s restaurant in Raleigh. Keenan juggles low-wage jobs, and his son, Tyreek, is a McDonald’s worker who had been injured on the job.
had filled out a survey and joined NC Raise Up, a small group of Durham workers pushing for what Sara believed was the unlikeliest solution to her problems yet. “Minimum wage of $15 an hour!” read one of the demands on a flier attached to her clipboard, even though the federal minimum had been stuck for a decade at $7.25. “Unions for All,” the flier read, even though union membership in the United States had been plummeting for 50 consecutive years and only 2.4 percent of workers in North Carolina belonged to unions. Sara walked through the bus terminal for an hour with a few other workers with NC Raise Up, the North Carolina branch of the national Fight for $15 movement to unionize workers and raise the minimum wage. She asked everyone to write a personal message about their lives — messages Sara and the other workers hoped to deliver to North Carolina leaders later that month during a hearing about the minimum wage at the State Capitol.
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Cover Story
At every moment, the smallest problem threatened to upend the fragile balance of her life.
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Sara nears tears on her porch in Durham, N.C., as she looks at a medical bill for her husband, Dee, with a stack of new ones waiting beside her.
ara had been both employed and poor for her entire adulthood, but only in the past few months had she learned that officially made her a part of something: the low-wage workforce, the fastest growing segment of a splintering American economy that continues to expand at both extremes. There were a record 53 million low-wage workers last year, or about 44 percent of all active workers in the United States. More than half were women. Two-thirds were in their prime earning years. Forty percent were supporting children at home. They earned a median annual salary of $17,950. Sara’s own version of those statistics meant waking up at 4:40 a.m. to catch the first city bus of the day because she didn’t have a car, and asking friends to share medications because she didn’t have health insurance, and working the past 11 years without taking a vacation because she couldn’t afford the time off. But what she resented most about being one of the working poor was the constant anxiety that came from having no margin for error. At every moment, the smallest problem threatened to upend the fragile balance of her life, and now on a day when she had $28.42 in savings and
$2.09 in checking, she arrived home from the bus station to find a big problem waiting in an envelope on her porch. “Eviction notice,” a letter read. “This is a 10-day warning.” Sara walked inside and her husband, Dee, came out from the kitchen. She handed him the notice, and he sat down on the couch. “You should call Rick,” he said, meaning their landlord, Rick Soles, who managed 400 properties in Durham. “He likes you. He’ll work with us.” “And what should I tell him?” Sara asked. “‘I know we owe fifteen hundred, but how’s sixty?’ He’d have a padlock on this door in no time.” Rick had already evicted them from three other homes in the past decade when they failed to pay, and after the last time, they’d moved with their children into a motel and then a homeless shelter. Sara had spent eight months working double shifts to pay back the eviction costs and save up for a new security deposit, and once they had the money there was only one place they could afford on a monthly budget of $800. It was a converted funeral home with two bedrooms, one bath and
a few bullet holes left by a previous tenant. They had strung Christmas lights over the porch and turned a utility closet into an extra bedroom to make the space work for a family of five, two dogs, three cats and a rotation of friends and relatives who sometimes slept on the couch. “We need to bring Rick something real,” Sara said. “Like seven hundred as a peace offering.” “Where’s that coming from?” Dee said. His voice was hoarse, and he tried to clear his throat. They were $120 behind on their cellphone bills, $210 on the electricity and $90 on the Internet. “Extra shifts,” Sara said. “Weekends. Doubles.” “It feels like I can’t get air,” Dee said, pointing to his throat, and she followed him to the back porch where he’d been spending much of his time during the past year, ever since his worsening health forced him to leave a $10-an-hour job at a recycling company. Doctors had diagnosed him with a hernia, two ulcers, a lung infection and severe COPD. He had spent three weeks in the hospital before returning home with an $18,000 bill, but Dee believed the root
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Clockwise from top left: Sara checks the neck and shoulders of Dee for swelling — a sign of trouble. Doctors have diagnosed him with a hernia, two ulcers, a lung infection and severe COPD. He often is too weak to work. After working a busy shift from 6:30 a.m. until 2:30 p.m., Sara tries to take a nap. Keenan worries at home in Durham, N.C., after a job he was depending on fell through for the day. Sara carries a knife in case she needs to protect herself as she walks to the bus stop in the dark.
of his health issues was at least partly situational. It was stress, he thought. It was exhaustion. It was anger. It was the shame he awoke to every morning when his wife’s alarm went off and all he could do was rub her feet, fix her breakfast, and hand her a knife to carry for self-defense on her walk to the bus stop. They’d been together since high school in a middle-class suburb of New Jersey. Sara had gotten pregnant at 17, hid it from her family, and then moved into a one-bedroom apartment with Dee. Their first debt of adulthood was for medical expenses related to the delivery. Their next was for child care so Sara could finish school. Their next was for student loans so Sara could take college classes in computer programming, which went nowhere. Now it was 11 apartments and a combined 28 low-wage jobs later. The blisters on Sara’s feet had hardened into scars and a tattoo on her forearm read, “Broken,” and Dee couldn’t stop apologizing for letting her down. He was trained in construction, welding and landscaping, but lately all he could do was care for the kids and work an occasional odd job in the neighborhood. “Why can’t I get any air?” Dee said again,
standing up on the porch, trying to open up his lungs. “Relax. Just breathe,” Sara said. “It feels like somebody’s standing on my chest,” he said. They could hear the hammering of construction a block away on a new million-dollar home, the latest sign of an economic expansion that had doubled the wealth of America’s top 10 percent. A Whole Foods Market had opened across from their neighborhood Family Dollar, rents in Durham had doubled and the basic living wage to provide for a family their size had risen to more than $34 an hour. Dee had started going with Sara to NC Raise Up meetings as the group prepared for its hearing at the State Capitol, and he’d heard what other low-wage workers were doing with their own rising anger. There had been more major worker strikes in the past year than anytime in the previous two decades. Grocery store clerks in New England, bus drivers in West Virginia, home health aides in California, even 90,000 teachers in North Carolina — they had all walked off the job, and sometimes Dee wished Sara could walk away, too.
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er alarm went off, and she willed herself out of bed at 4:40 a.m. “It could be a big day,” she said to Dee as she put on her Waffle House apron, whispering so she didn’t wake the kids. It was Friday. Payday. The restaurant would be crowded. Her customers would be happy. She would laugh at their jokes and refill their coffees. They would splurge on big orders and reward her with bigger tips. “A hundred-dollar day, easy,” she said. “I can feel it.” Dee swallowed his morning medications and watched her get dressed. He handed her a Waffle House hat and checked to make sure she was carrying her knife for protection. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I feel good. I think I could even get to $150,” Sara said, and she kissed him goodbye and tiptoed out the front door. Her days unfolded in a series of financial calculations, and here came the first: She could spend $14 on a taxi to make sure she was the first waitress to arrive at Waffle House, allowing her to work the busiest section of the restaurant and increase her tips. Or she could
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“Some people live paycheck to paycheck, but I live tip to tip. That means my family lives tip to tip.” Sara Fearrington, at a hearing for raising the minimum wage in North Carolina
Cover Story gamble by waiting to take the first city bus of the morning, which sometimes arrived late and sometimes broke down and sometimes took more than an hour as it hit dozens of traffic lights on the way across town. But the bus only cost $2. She walked to the bus stop just as the driver pulled up five minutes early. The bus cruised through the lights and she arrived at the restaurant before anyone else. She loved her job most in this moment, when it felt to her like anything could happen. The federal minimum wage for tipped workers was unchanged since Sara started high school, and even with her tips included she usually only earned about $9 an hour. But there was also the possibility for a surprise, like when she’d helped a single mother calm her child during a tantrum and the mother left her $100, or when one of her regulars dropped $50 for a $7 tab. She greeted her first customer of the day, a man carrying a briefcase and wearing a tie. “Morning, hon,” she said, leading him to one of the three booths, fetching his coffee before he could so much as sit down. He thanked her and placed a $16 order. She whistled her way over to the cook. “Big day,” she said, as the cook greased the grill. “I can feel it.” And then she waited. She watched the front door. She said hello to the other two waitresses as they arrived for their shifts. She rang up her first customer at the register, and he handed her a $2 tip. She refilled bottles of ketchup that were already almost full. She wiped down tables that were already clean. She lifted the window shades above her three booths and watched as the darkness outside turned into dawn, and then as breakfast time turned into brunch, all while the restaurant remained mostly empty. “What the hell’s going on?” another waitress said. “I don’t come here to waste time, and that’s exactly what we’re doing.” “Maybe because it’s the end of the month,” the cook said. “People run out of money.” “It’s still early,” Sara said, even though it was almost noon. “Might turn around.” She’d been working in food service since she turned 16, and she could memorize any order and perform every job from greeter to the head cook. She’d been held up at gunpoint at a Red Lobster when she was eight months pregnant and then finished the rest of her shift. Her mother had died, and she’d gone back to work two days later. It had been 13 years since her last trip to visit family in New Jersey, and during that time she’d earned low wages for six different chains before starting at Waffle House, which was both her favorite and the most challenging. The restaurant offered low prices and no alcohol, which meant small bills and smaller tips. Success as a waitress depended on speed — on turning over tables in an average of 20 or 30 minutes, which could only happen if there were customers waiting to eat. She watched a train pass on the tracks outside the window. She sent a text message to Dee. “Slow, slow, slow,” she wrote. She counted down the final minutes of her shift and sat in
one of her empty booths to add her receipts: Sixteen tables for the day. Four takeout orders. Two parties that left her no tip whatsoever. Not a $150-dollar day, or a $100-dollar day, but a total of $43 in tips.
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he next day she awoke to a message from one of the organizers at NC Raise Up: “Stop the cycle now!” it read. “Come show our power.” The invitation came on behalf of Keenan Harton, 46, who volunteered with NC Raise Up while juggling jobs at a landscaping company and Biscuitville. He’d worked at drive-through windows off and on for the past 30 years, and recently his son, Tyreek, had graduated from high school and also begun to work full time in fast food. Tyreek, 20, was at McDonald’s, where a few weeks earlier he’d cut his hand on a metal toaster, wrapped the injury, and continued his shift. The cut had become infected, and Tyreek had spent three nights in the hospital before returning to his next shift at $7.75 an hour. “He needs to know he’s worth something,” Keenan told other workers with NC Raise Up, and several dozen had agreed to join him for a protest of working conditions at McDonald’s and to rally for the right to unionize. Keenan hoped his son, who was in the middle of his shift, would walk out of the restaurant on a one-day strike and join them. An organizer motioned for the protesters to begin moving toward the restaurant. Sara had never participated in a march, or a demonstration of any kind, and she positioned herself near the back as they headed toward McDonald’s in a single-file line. The first protesters made it inside and then dozens more followed, shouting, chanting and banging on red plastic drums. “We work, we sweat, put $15 on our check!” they
yelled, as Sara entered the restaurant and began chanting with them. They pushed toward the front register. A McDonald’s manager took out his cellphone to call police. “We stand with Tyreek,” the protesters shouted, while in the kitchen Tyreek continued to shovel fries. “Tyreek is not alone!” the crowd chanted, yelling his name again and again, until finally he emerged from the kitchen wearing a gauze cast on his injured arm. He jammed his hands into his pockets. Sara pushed forward in the crowd. “Don’t be scared! Don’t back down!” she yelled. Tyreek removed his McDonald’s headset. He took off his hat. He untied his apron. He came over to join Keenan, and the protesters walked out in celebration. “We’re about to wake North Carolina up!” Sara told Tyreek, congratulating him, inviting him to their upcoming hearing at the State Capitol. Seven states had already approved legislation to get to $15. Maybe the next raise would be theirs.
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he next day, Sara began to write the first speech of her life. “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” she practiced saying, again and again. She rehearsed on 5 a.m. bus rides and during breaks at work. Then one afternoon, she totaled up $48 in tips and boarded a bus with other NC Raise Up workers headed for Raleigh, where she imagined facing dozens of lawmakers under the Capitol dome. But it turned out the Capitol didn’t have room to host the hearing, so instead the bus parked at a church across the street. Sara walked into the church and saw that most people seated in the rows of folding chairs were not in fact lawmakers but other low-wage workers and activists from across the state. The
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Opposite page: At the NC Raise Up union hall in Durham, Sara practices the speech she intended to deliver at the State Capitol to lobby for a raise in the minimum wage. Left: Sara dozes off and leans on Dee as they ride the bus back to Durham from the hearing. She had been up since 5 a.m.
governor had declined his invitation and offered to send a staff member. That staff member had canceled at the last moment. Out of the 170 elected state lawmakers that controlled the state’s minimum wage, only five were in their seats as an organizer stepped to the lectern. “Welcome to a historic night for workers in North Carolina,” he said, and then he called the first of 21 scheduled speakers, each of whom had been given three minutes. When Sara’s turn came, she unfolded her speech on the lectern and smiled at the small group of politicians seated on a stage. “Some people live paycheck to paycheck, but I live tip to tip,” she said. “That means my family lives tip to tip.” She told them about customers who left no tip at all. She told them about shifts when she made $3.10 an hour. She told them: “We are not worth less because we make less, and I’m not going to stop fighting.” She started to tell them about working 55-hour weeks while moving her family into a homeless shelter, and eventually an organizer near the front of the stage held up a sign marked with a red X. Three minutes. Her time was up. “All I do is work, and
I can’t meet my basic needs,” she said. “I always, always work.” “Your story cut through to me,” one of the politicians said from the stage, a little while later, when it was his turn to say whether he supported a $15 minimum wage. He said he’d worked as a valet during college in the late 1990s and earned what Sara was making now. “I’m kind of the outlier, because I didn’t come here as a supporter,” he said. “My party isn’t for raising wages. My friends aren’t for it. But what I see now is there’s a real problem, so thank you.” He handed the microphone to the next politician, but a few people in the crowd started to yell. “Is that a yes or a no on $15?” Dee shouted. “Yes or no?” the crowd chanted, and after almost a minute the politician reached back for the microphone. “I came in tonight and I was a no,” he said. He pointed at Sara. “After hearing your story, I don’t think there’s any choice. I will walk out tonight and it’s a yes for me.” The workers erupted in applause. Sara wiped her eyes. She hugged her 9-year-old daughter. “Which senator was that?” she asked, when
the event ended, and an organizer explained that the man onstage was a Libertarian candidate running for the state House of Representatives. He’d received 3 percent of the vote in 2018 and now he was trying again. “Oh,” Sara said. “So he’s not going to be voting or anything?” “It was still a major victory,” the organizer said. “Movements take time. We’re growing, we’re creating alliances, but the full push could take —” “Years. I know,” Sara said. She leaned against Dee, and he reached down to rub her ankles. “We’re building momentum,” the organizer said, and Sara nodded. “You changed someone’s mind,” Dee said. “That’s major.” “I’m tired,” she said, and a few minutes later they were out of the church and traveling back toward Durham, back into a house where the rent was behind, the electric bill was overdue and the Internet had just been cut off. They didn’t have years or even days. “If we can just get through tomorrow,” Sara told Dee as she set her alarm, and five hours later she was walking back to the bus. n
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Opinions
It’s now or never for the U.S. to stop coronavirus Tom Bossert served as homeland security adviser to President Trump from 2017 to 2018.
The first phase of the coronavirus outbreak was a domestic challenge for China and a border containment one for the United States and others. Now we are in the second phase: community mitigation. Math and history must guide our next steps. ¶ The near-term objective should be to reduce the acute, exponential growth of the outbreak to reduce suffering and the strain on our health-care system. That requires significant effort, but it can work, as we have seen: Hong Kong and Singapore have achieved linear growth of covid-19 cases, staving off the terrifying exponential upward curve confronting Italy and pushing both the infection rate down and new cases out on the timeline. Everyone in the United States needs to take note. This virus is such a threat because it is both highly infectious and lethal, and not enough people are being tested, despite significant recent efforts by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. By the time cases are confirmed, significant community transmission has likely already occurred. This is a classic tip-ofthe-iceberg phenomenon. But the most useful comparison now is to a fire that threatens to burn out of control. It is one we can still contain — even extinguish — if we act. The best way to put out the fire is a vaccine, but that is over a year away. In the meantime, we must focus — as much of the country is doing now — on reducing the height of the outbreak curve. School closures, isolation of the sick, home quarantines of those who have come into contact with the sick, social distancing, telework and largegathering cancellations needed to be implemented before the spread of the disease in any community reached 1 percent. After that, science tells us, these
interventions become far less effective. Simply put, as evidence of human-to-human transmission becomes clear in a community, officials must pull the trigger on aggressive interventions. Time matters. Two weeks of delay can mean the difference between success and failure. Public health experts learned this in 1918 when the Spanish flu killed 50 million to 100 million people around the globe. If we fail to take action, we will watch our health-care system be overwhelmed. For days now, public health messaging has been framed in light of this clear objective. Community-based interventions are needed to delay the outbreak peak. On this, the 1918 flu taught us a lot. The difference between the steps taken in Philadelphia, which waited too long back then, and St. Louis, which acted quickly, is staggering. Aggressive interventions put off and ease the peak burden on hospitals and other health-care infrastructure. Ultimately, these measures can also diminish the overall number of cases and health impacts. Consider the actions taken in Italy. On Feb. 20, Italy reported
Lindsey Wasson/Reuters
A nurse processes a patient sample at a drive-through testing site for coronavirus for employees at the University of Washington Medical Center Northwest in Seattle on Monday.
three instances of infection and no known deaths. On Feb. 21, Italy had 20 cases and its first attributed death. Officials implemented interventions, including school closures, the following day and instituted a cordon sanitaire affecting 50,000 people. That’s aggressive, but it was too late. On Feb. 22, Italy reported 63 cases and a second death. A little more than a week later, there were 2,036 cases, with 140 patients in serious condition and 52 deaths. Today, the numbers continue to climb, with more than 12,500 cases and more than 800 dead. This past week, the government expanded travel restrictions to the entire country. By contrast, Hong Kong and Singapore acted immediately and are still holding the line, literally. Through isolation, quarantines, contact tracing, canceled gatherings and widespread surveillance, they have achieved linear growth of the virus, meaning a reproduction number close to one. What they are doing is working. Working parents without child care have a legitimate concern, and we must find ways to help one another. But school closings, as Ohio did across the state this week, can be the single most effective intervention.
Amid an influenza pandemic, schools would be closed to protect the students themselves. Because children are not among the groups most vulnerable to coronavirus, schools should be closed in an effort to reduce community transmission and to protect parents and grandparents. How long? Epidemiologists suggest eight weeks might be needed to arrest this outbreak. Administrators, students, teachers and parents need to get busy figuring out how to continue the education of our children while contributing to this public health effort. The United States and other liberal societies must mount a significant, coordinated response with public buy-in. Panic must be avoided. Most people who become infected are likely to get what feels like a mild case of seasonal flu. Many will not develop symptoms. But the elderly and otherwise infirm are at risk, and the number of Americans likely to be hospitalized and the subset of those who will require some form of critical care could still be significant. The rates will be worse if the disease is not aggressively countered early. But I know we can all work together for the greater good. n
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Five Myths
Jane Austen BY
D EVONEY L OOSER
It is a truth universally acknowledged that somewhere a new novel, biography, play, series or film inspired by Jane Austen (1775-1817) must be in want of readers and viewers. Thanks to the PBS Masterpiece series “Sanditon” and Autumn de Wilde’s new film, “Emma,” Austen is again proving a hot screen commodity. Yet the author best known for “Pride and Prejudice” (1813) and “Sense and Sensibility” (1811) has had her share of troubles, too. She might also be said to prompt fables and fabrication, lore and lies, and misconceptions and mendacity. Some myths about her have circulated for more than a century. Myth No. 1 Jane Austen was a secluded, boring homebody. The myth of her sheltered existence originated with her brother Henry’s short biographical notice, published as a preface to the first edition of “Northanger Abbey”and “Persuasion” (1818). Henry describes his late sister as having lived “not by any means a life of event.” But things happened to her! For one thing, she had seven siblings. Her father ran a small boarding school for boys out of the family’s home. How quiet a girlhood could that have been? Then she lived for several years in the resort town of Bath, the Regency-era young person’s equivalent of Cancun. She visited London and frequented its rowdy theaters, where vendors sold audience members rotten fruit specifically for the purpose of hurling it at the actors. Myth No. 2 There is no sex in Austen’s work. You’ll find plenty of illicit sex in Austen’s fiction, including seductions, adultery, out-ofwedlock pregnancy and prostitution. “Pride and Prejudice” includes a flirt who runs off with a rake who is later bribed into marrying her. “Sense and Sensibility” describes a young woman who is seduced, abandoned and pregnant, and whose mother had been an abused wife, a kept
mistress and then sunk deeper still. And obviously, any author who could create Mr. Darcy — who “drew the attention of the room” by his “fine, tall person” and “handsome features,” and who’s been interpreted as a tasty dish by almost a century of actors, from Colin Keith-Johnston to Colin Firth — must understand the power of sex appeal. Myth No. 3 Austen approved of slavery and colonialism. Was Austen proslavery and an apologist for colonialism, as the cultural critic Edward Said famously argued? These claims often come down to what she leaves unsaid, as it does for Said, who argues that her characters’ pointed silences on colonialism signal the author’s elitist neglect. But if the alt-right has found things to appreciate in Austen, it’s not because her fiction touts exclusion and racial hatred. Anti-slavery commentary appears in “Emma,” when elegant Jane Fairfax decries the dehumanizing slave trade and governess trade, comparing the sale of human flesh to that of human intellect. It’s also been argued that the title of “Mansfield Park” intentionally echoes the name of Lord Mansfield, the judge whose 1772 ruling said chattel slavery was unsupported by English common law.
Focus Features/Associated Press
Anya Taylor-Joy plays the title character in the new film adaptation of Jane Austen’s “Emma.” The book was published anonymously in 1815 and got favorable reviews, most famously from Sir Walter Scott.
Myth No. 4 Austen’s work wasn’t noticed before she died. This myth mistakes anonymous publication for total obscurity and turns moderate popular and critical success into literary disregard. Austen published “Sense and Sensibility” (1811) with the anonymous credit “By a Lady.” She published her next books “by the author of ‘Sense and Sensibility’” and “by the author of ‘Pride and Prejudice.’ ” Her novels went into multiple editions and attracted positive reviews. The most famous was of “Emma,” in the prestigious Quarterly Review. The anonymous reviewer, bestselling novelist Sir Walter Scott, claimed that the book’s author was “already known to the public by the two novels announced in her title-page”: “Pride and Prejudice, &c.” He declares that the author of “Emma” creates sketches of “spirit and originality” about common occurrences. “In this class,” he says, “she stands almost alone.” Scott may not yet have known this admired author’s name, but others got wind of it. By 1815, the
Prince Regent, a fan of her novels, knew Austen’s name with sufficient certainty that he invited (read: commanded) her to dedicate her next book to him. Myth No. 5 Austen-inspired fan fiction emerged in the 20th century. The Guardian claims that Sybil Brinton’s 1913 “Old Friends and New Fancies,” which imagines Elizabeth Darcy, Elinor Ferrars and Anne Wentworth as chums, was the first work of Austeninspired fan fiction. But Austen-inspired fan fiction dates back a century earlier. A piece of real-person fiction, using Austen as a character, appeared in the Lady’s Magazine in 1823. It imagines Austen as a ghost, says she had a nose that expressed her genius and describes what she wore in life. Perhaps this piece of fiction was so long overlooked because critics wrongly believed that Austen was unread in the 1820s. n Looser, the Foundation professor of English at Arizona State University, is the author of “The Making of Jane Austen” and the editor of “The Daily Jane Austen: A Year of Quotes.”
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