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Oh, copyright troll Richard Liebowitz is at it again. Last month, we wrote about an absolutely massive benchslap he received, as a judge detailed pages upon pages of Liebowitz lying to various courts, filing questionable lawsuits, and doing all sorts of things no lawyer should ever do. And now that list is getting longer.

Apparently Liebowitz has spent nearly two years engaged in a lawsuit in which he never informed his own client about anything related to the lawsuit. The client -- a photographer named Glen Craig -- seems reasonably upset by all this. I know I would be.

Dear Judge Yandle,

I learned for the first time last week about a case that Richard Liebowitz filed in this Court in 2018 in my name: Craig v. PopMatters Media, Inc. He dismissed the case and PopMatters has a motion pending for its attorney's fees. This is all a total surprise to me. Richard blindsided me. He didn't tell me anything about this case, or another case he filed in the Northern District of Illinois, until yesterday after I demanded an explanation.

Oops.

You can see from the docket that this case took the usual path of many Liebowitz cases. Sue first (in September of 2018) and then when the other side starts to push back, Liebowitz cuts and runs, filing for dismissal. Later, PopMatters sought attorneys' fees for having to deal with the nonsense lawsuit, and then there had been some back and forth paper filings between PopMatters (represented by Dan Booth, who has become a constant thorn in the side of Liebowitz) and Liebowitz, who continues to try to get out of this case without getting into any more trouble.

And a bombshell dropped yesterday when the judge saw this letter from Craig -- ostensibly Liebowitz's client -- in the lawsuit, stating he had no knowledge at all of the lawsuit. The judge notes that while it's quite irregular for a party to the lawsuit to directly file documents, this seems to be a special case:

While "hybrid representation" (i.e., a represented party filing papers on her own) is generally prohibited, see Carlson v. CSX Transp., Inc. 745 F.3d. 819, 826 (7th Cir.2014); United States v. Chavin, 316 F.3d 666, 671-72 (7th Cir.2002), Plaintiff's assertions in the attached letter are directly material to Plaintiff's exposure to and liability for attorney's fees and costs being sought in a motion currently pending before the Court (see Doc. 10 ). Accordingly, the letter shall be included in the record for the Court's consideration.

And with that the letter is added to the docket. The first paragraph is above, but it goes on beyond that:

He never told me PopMatters used my photograph. He never asked me if it had been licensed to anyone or I would have told him about my license to Sony. He never told me he was going to file either lawsuit and he did it without my knowledge and without my permission. He never told me PopMatters made offers to settle each case. He never told me PopMatters filed a motion for attorney's fees in either case. He never consulted me about anything.

That's... really bad. That's the kind of thing a lawyer might get disbarred for. Craig notes that Liebowitz seems to also be violating the contract they signed, let alone basically all fundamental ethics rules for lawyers:

In the retainer agreement. he agreed to "keep You informed of the status of your matter, and agree to explain the laws pertinent to your situation, the available course(s) of action, and the attendant risks." Richard violated that at every step of this case. I agreed "to fully cooperate with the Firm in the administration of the matter" and "seriously to consider any settlement offer that Attorneys recommend before making a decision to accept or reject such offer." Richard made that impossible because he never told me about the lawsuit or PopMatters' settlement offer.

I have now seen the response that Richard filed in this Court on June 11, 2020 without consulting me. He wrote, "Plaintiff choose the Southern District of Illinois as his venue of choice, in part due to the availability of his counsel, Liebowitz Law Firm." I was never consulted about this action and did not choose to file it at all. I would not have authorized filing it in this Court if Richard had asked. Richard made every choice, not me. He also wrote that "Defendant has failed to show that Plaintiff's counsel acted in bad faith, and therefore the request for sanctions should be denied." I do not know how Richard filing a lawsuit without my knowledge could be anything other than bad faith.

Richard did all this behind my back and without my authority. I had no idea about this lawsuit or the lawsuit in the Northern District of Illinois until I got a demand from PopMatters' lawyer on June 29, 2020 for the attorney's fees award that was entered in the Northern District of Illinois in March, also without my knowledge.

That is... really, really bad. And then, even worse, is Liebowitz's response when Craig finally called him about this. You may recognize this side of Liebowitz trying to weasel out of things from what he's said in court in previous cases when he's finally called out by judges:

I sent Richard an email on July 6, 2020: "Richard, is this once again something you did and did not relay to me or ask me over two years ago. I have not spoken or heard from you since Feb. 2020 and now this. Please explain what this is and how I got mixed up in this matter." We talked yesterday, July 7, 2020. I told him what I knew about the case and asked him, "How come you didn't come to me?" He had no response. He tried to put the onus on me. "It's par for the course" he said. "You roll the dice, you see what you get."

Let's be clear here: this is not "par for the course" for anyone other than Richard Liebowitz. This is not how any of this is supposed to work. It does seem to be Liebowitz's standard practice to roll the dice and hope to get something good out of it, but this is not how a lawyer is supposed to behave. Craig seems to recognize all of this, and notes that Liebowitz has been rolling the dice quite a bit on his behalf:

I'm not the one who rolled the dice. That was all Richard. Last year in another case I caught him negotiating a settlement under the table without my knowledge. There are other cases that he filed in my name that I only found out about after the fact. This whole case is malpractice, a breach of my agreement with Richard and a total fraud. Now I know he's a scam artist and I don't want to be another one of his victims.

And of course, Craig notes that if anyone should pay attorney's fees, that should be on Liebowitz, not himself:

I understand that PopMatters asked for its attorney's fees either against me under the Copyright Act or as sanctions against Richard. He should have to pay any award, not me. I am asking you to please consider the facts of the matter and require Richard Liebowitz to pay the attorney's fees to PopMatters.

Let's just say that it's not very often that a client shows up in court to tell the judge he has no idea that the lawsuit exists and hopes the judge will make his own lawyer pay the other lawyer's fees.

I've said a few times now when attorneys' fees have been awarded and potentially fell upon the plaintiffs who had hired Liebowitz that one hopes that Liebowitz was honest enough to warn his clients of the liability they might face. However, I didn't consider that he'd started going around filing lawsuits without even telling those clients in the first place.

At this point, you have to wonder just how much longer Liebowitz will be allowed to practice law. I know these things take time, but the record of his misdeeds is really quite stunning.

Some scientists expect that a Covid-19 coronavirus vaccine will be ready in record time, but others are skeptical. | Mladen Antonov/AFP via Getty Images

Not all experts are optimistic we’ll have a vaccine by the end of the year. 

When will an effective Covid-19 coronavirus vaccine be ready for production for the general public?

Some top US health officials and researchers now expect one will be approved for use in less than a year. The specific estimates vary, but they say that the current push for a Covid-19 vaccine is unmatched in its scale and speed. With over 140 vaccine candidates being studied, more than one is likely to pan out, they say.

“I am guardedly optimistic that by the end of 2020 we will have at least one vaccine that has been proven safe and effective in a large-scale trial,” Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, told New York magazine on July 1.

Similarly, Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at NIH, said while there’s no guarantee that a vaccine will come to fruition, it is more likely than not.

He told a United Nations meeting July 8 that he has “cautious optimism that we will be successful at least in developing a vaccine with some degree of efficacy by the end of the year, the beginning of 2021.” It echoes similar comments he made to Congress in June.

There is also mounting political pressure for good news. As the United States has become the epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic, leading the world in cases and deaths, the White House has been desperate for any beacon of hope in an election year marked by its disastrous pandemic response. On July 15, the vaccine developer Moderna published some preliminary results in the New England Journal of Medicine showing that its vaccine candidate was able to generate antibodies to Covid-19 in test patients, a critical step toward demonstrating some immunity to the virus. President Trump hailed the announcement on Twitter:

But does it make sense to bank on a vaccine by the end of the year?

After all, a vaccine developed in less than a year would break the record by a wide margin. The fastest vaccine ever developed was the mumps vaccine. It took four years, and the first iteration in 1948 only provided short-lived immunity. Many other vaccines have taken longer than a decade to come to fruition.

That’s why other officials have been hesitant to even suggest a timeline. “I can’t predict when a vaccine will be available,” Stephen Hahn, commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, told ABC’s This Week on July 5.

Rick Bright, the former head of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, was also less sanguine. “A lot of optimism is swirling around a 12- to 18-month time frame, if everything goes perfectly,” he told lawmakers in May. “We’ve never seen everything go perfectly. I think it’s going to take longer than that.”

And Merck CEO Kenneth Frazier told Harvard Business School on July 13 that officials need to be more cautious about suggesting a timeline. “I think when people tell the public that there’s going to be a vaccine by the end of 2020, they do a grave disservice to the public,” he said.

All the while, there’s been a flurry of activity among vaccine developers, with new announcements of positive results seemingly every few days.

The emerging data certainly is encouraging and points toward the world developing a vaccine for Covid-19 quickly. But there is a much longer road ahead toward ending the pandemic, and there are many things that can still go wrong along the way.

Why some researchers think we’ll get a Covid-19 vaccine in record time

The urgency of a dangerous, fast-spreading virus has spurred an unprecedented amount of research. Scientists are pooling findings and resources from around the world on a scale never seen before. “There is a great deal of collaboration and coordination between the federal government, academic groups, and industry that we don’t typically see,” said Stephen Thomas, a vaccine researcher and head of the infectious disease division at SUNY Upstate Medical University.

There’s also a ton of money flowing into the endeavor. The United States launched Operation Warp Speed under the Department of Health and Human Services with almost $10 billion at its disposal. Its goal is to deliver 300 million doses of a Covid-19 vaccine by January 2021. The program is making investments not only in vaccine research, but in building factories and supply chains for multiple vaccines, with the expectation that not every vaccine effort will pan out.

The program recently awarded $1.6 billion to the vaccine research firm Novavax. That’s in addition to funding Covid-19 vaccine development efforts at companies including Johnson & Johnson, Moderna, and AstraZeneca.

Companies and research groups in turn have been making progress. Pfizer and BioNTech announced earlier this month that early tests showed their vaccine could generate an immune response. In addition to its recent promising preliminary data from phase 1 trials, Moderna also expects to begin its final phase of testing later this month. Meanwhile, researchers at the Jenner Institute at Oxford University said that they could have millions of doses of their vaccine candidate as soon as September under emergency approval.

Part of the optimism for getting a Covid-19 vaccine within months instead of years also stems from the virus itself. SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind Covid-19, comes from a family of coronaviruses like SARS and MERS that researchers have been studying for years. That’s given them a head start in examining the latest entrant.

And the fact that the vast majority of people infected with the virus recover on their own shows that most human immune systems are capable of fending off this disease. It stands to reason, then, that a vaccine could be designed to train immune systems to keep Covid-19 at bay. That’s in contrast to a virus like HIV, for which very few people have natural immunity or resistance, so scientists have yet to develop a vaccine for the virus despite decades of effort.

The technology behind vaccines has also improved in recent decades. In particular, Thomas highlighted the rise of platform-based systems for vaccines. Rather than engineering a vaccine from scratch for every new virus, scientists are developing vaccines with standard parts that have a few components that can be tweaked to make it work for a specific virus.

“I kind of look at it as the platform is the car and the specific disease that you’re looking at, those are the passengers,” Thomas said. “Because you know how the car is built and you’ve manufactured the car multiple times before, there’s a lot less work that has to go into a developing a new car every time.”

For instance, companies like CanSino Biologics and Johnson & Johnson are developing vaccines for Covid-19 that use a different virus, the adenovirus, as a vector to deliver genetic material coding for SARS-CoV-2 proteins that will trigger an immune response. Moderna, meanwhile, is developing an mRNA vaccine, an even newer platform that allowed the company to move with breathtaking speed.

“Moderna went 66 days from the time the sequence of Covid was published to their first injection of a patient,” said Drew Weissman, a professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania whose research was licensed by Moderna.

Some of these platforms, however, have never been approved for human use, which means they need extensive testing. To this end, clinical trials are also speeding up. Regulators have allowed vaccine developers to combine phases of clinical trials or run them concurrently.

Right now, the vaccines are still being tested. They have to meet a higher bar for safety than a treatment for Covid-19. Since vaccines have to be administered to vastly more people than a treatment, including the healthy, any risks are magnified. So while the development process has accelerated, researchers say there can’t be any compromise on safety.

Even so, some vaccine developers have already posted some encouraging results. Some companies have shown their vaccine candidates have few safety problems and found evidence that they could lead to effective immunity.

“I think the optimism is warranted,” said Anna Durbin, a vaccine researcher and a professor of international health at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. “We should be able to see efficacy results from two or more of those trials by the end of [2020].”

In sum, the pace of research, the extraordinary amount of resources devoted to the effort, promising new technologies, and early positive results are leading some scientists to believe the world will have a Covid-19 vaccine soon.

“I think it is likely we will have one or more vaccines available to the public by the first quarter of next year,” said Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, in an email.

Thomas estimated that it would take a bit longer. “I would be very surprised if there was a vaccine available before the second quarter of calendar year 2021,” he said.

There’s a lot that can still derail a coronavirus vaccine

Throwing an enormous amount of money and labor at the challenge of developing a Covid-19 vaccine is still no guarantee that one will be ready soon, if one is made at all.

While the early results from vaccine trials are pointing in the right direction, they still need far more validation before they’re cleared for widespread use. That requires testing tens of thousands of human subjects. Figuring out the efficacy of a vaccine is particularly time-consuming because researchers have to compare a test group to a control group and see how they respond to natural exposures to Covid-19 over time. How quickly that happens can change depending on how prevalent the virus is within a given population. It can take months.

Scientists also don’t know for certain whether the presence of antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 confers immunity, and they don’t know how long that immunity would last. That’s another factor that can only be revealed by waiting and seeing.

Though companies have been making promising announcements in press releases and the occasional pre-peer review paper, some are still being cagey with their data. “There aren’t a lot of results that have been posted,” Durbin said.

However, even if a vaccine is proven safe and effective by the end of the year, it can’t end the pandemic without a coordinated vaccination effort. Enough people have to be vaccinated within a population to build up herd immunity, making it so the virus can’t easily spread and so that even the remaining unvaccinated people are protected. Building up that capability will take time, and at the outset, governments will have to make some difficult decisions about who is going to be vaccinated first. “Without question, we are not going to have enough doses for every single person in the world,” Durbin said.

Getting enough vaccines to end the pandemic will therefore require a global supply chain, gargantuan manufacturing capabilities, and thousands of people trained to administer the vaccine.

That might be the biggest vulnerability for the United States. The country is still struggling to test enough people for Covid-19 and is still having problems getting adequate personal protective equipment to health workers months into the pandemic. Tests and PPE are far less complicated to manufacture than vaccines, so logistical challenges may end up as a major obstacle to a vaccination effort.

So while a Covid-19 vaccine could arrive at a record pace, actually getting it to enough people to end the crisis could be a much longer ordeal. The science is solvable, but building the political will to use it effectively remains a stubborn hurdle.

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A health care worker in the Covid-19 Unit at United Memorial Medical Center in Houston, Texas, on July 2. | Mark Felix/AFP via Getty Images

If hospitalizations continue to rise, health care workers in Arizona, Texas, and California fear they’ll be completely overwhelmed.

With Covid-19 hospitalizations steadily approaching a record high in the US, states like Arizona have activated emergency plans and requested refrigerated trucks to prepare for overflow at morgues. Doctors there say packed emergency rooms and ICUs are forcing them to prioritize the sickest patients, leaving other ill patients to deteriorate while waiting for care they’d ordinarily receive right away.

Hospitals in hot spots across the country are expanding and even maxing out their staff, equipment, and beds, with doctors warning that the worst-case scenario of hospital resources being overwhelmed is on the horizon if their states don’t get better control of the coronavirus.

“With Covid, a lot of times people who aren’t sick enough yet get pushed to the back, and then they can become really, really sick unfortunately because we were focusing our efforts on the people who are on the brink of death,” an emergency room doctor at the Banner Health system in the Phoenix metro area, who asked to go unnamed fearing retaliation from his employer, told Vox.

Other doctors in Arizona, where 90 percent of hospital beds statewide were in use Tuesday, say the scarcity of resources means they’ll soon be rationing medical care, as doctors in Italy were forced to do.

“The fear is we are going to have to start sharing ventilators, or we’re gonna have to start saying, ‘You get a vent, you don’t.’ I’d be really surprised if in a couple weeks we didn’t have to do that,” says Murtaza Akhter, an emergency medicine physician at Valleywise Health Medical Center in Phoenix.

It’s not just Arizona. Doctors and hospital experts in Texas and Southern California say capacity is a major concern for them as well, particularly if new daily cases keep rising. Several counties in California are facing major outbreaks of the virus, with hospital resources stretched thin to care for the sickest patients.

States have started to roll back their reopenings in recognition of the intensity of current transmission. California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Monday he would order some businesses to close again. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has finally issued a statewide mask mandate and closed certain establishments. Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey also reimposed some restrictions, though has refused to require residents to wear masks in public spaces, instead asking for voluntary compliance with public health experts’ advice.

The question is, will it be enough?

“If things continue to get worse,” John Swartzberg, a clinical professor emeritus at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health, says, medical care for Covid-19 patients “will get much more draconian.”

When New York and New Jersey raced to expand hospital capacity in April to handle the crush of Covid-19 patients, Sunbelt states largely avoided the big spring wave. But after their governors moved forward with reopening in May even though they didn’t meet the public health criteria set by the federal government to stay safe, three states in particular — Arizona, Texas, and Florida — saw significant increases in new cases.

Experts say these outbreaks are largely driven by people flocking to newly reopened restaurants, bars, gyms, and other high-risk indoor spaces, as well as weakly enforced or nonexistent face mask mandates. Now, with new cases and hospitalizations rising in 44 US states and territories, many fear some hot spots may be faced with even bigger surges, with less ability to expand capacity than hospital-dense New York City.

Hospitalizations nationwide are now quickly on their way to exceeding the peak of 59,539 on April 15, hitting 56,147 on Wednesday, according to the Covid Tracking Project.

Christina Animashaun/Vox

Hospital organizations in Florida say facilities there can still expand capacity if needed. But they, like other hot spot hospitals, are starting to cut back on elective surgeries and procedures — leading them to furlough staff in some cases to compensate for massive losses in revenue — to accommodate the rising tide of Covid-19 patients.

And most worrying for the states now battling major outbreaks is that, unlike in April, when most of the country was in lockdown, there’s no clear sense of when the current outbreaks will peak or decline. With only partial social distancing measures in place and inconsistent mask use, the virus may continue to spread, leading to an unabated wave of severe illness requiring hospitalization, more deaths, and more long-term complications requiring medical care.

Here’s a closer look at how some hospitals in Arizona, Florida, Texas, and Southern California are handling the pressures of the latest surge of Covid-19 patients, and why it may get worse in the coming weeks.

Arizona doctors say the surge is forcing them to make brutal decisions in patient care. Meanwhile, morale is dangerously low.

As Vox’s German Lopez has reported, Arizona’s Covid-19 outbreak has lately been the worst in the country, with the highest test positivity rate of all the states: 24.7 percent of tests coming back positive (nearly five times the recommended maximum of 5 percent), compared with 18.7 percent in Florida and 17 percent in Texas, according to Johns Hopkins.

It also, until very recently, had the highest number of daily cases per 100,000 people. (As of Wednesday, Florida was in the lead, with 54 new cases per day per 100,000 people, compared with Arizona’s 48, according to data compiled by the Washington Post.)

Whichever metric you’re looking at, the implication is the same: The virus continues to spread rapidly in the state, despite the governor’s (relatively weak) efforts to discourage indoor gatherings and ensure widespread face mask use since reopening. Meanwhile, hospitalizations are rising steeply following the upward trend in new cases. The heat wave underway, which is forcing more people indoors, isn’t helping, either.

The unchecked transmission of the virus in the state and resulting pressure on hospitals are particularly infuriating to some emergency room and ICU staff, who say they are losing hope that they will get any relief from the surge of severely ill Covid-19 patients anytime soon. And they’re having to make decisions on the fly that they’re uncomfortable making.

“Sending people with Covid home with oxygen tanks because we don’t have the resources for them? This is something I’ve never done in my life before,” says Akhter of Valleywise Health. “This is crazy. And this is gonna be even worse in a couple of weeks. So far we’re trying to hold steady, but how long will that last?”

The psychological toll, he says, is serious too.

“To come off a shift and be like, ‘I’m losing hope’ — that’s a dangerous place to be in,” he says. “I don’t want to feel that way. And that’s because despite the horrible numbers, despite the fact I’m still getting the Covid cases [in the ER], despite what we’ve been saying to the media from the front line, I drive home from work and I literally see lots of people congregating together closely and in the grocery store not wearing masks.”

Another ICU doctor in Phoenix, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because his employer has forbidden staff to speak to the media, described increasingly low morale among health care workers in the state.

“I think a lot of us feel as if our community has abandoned us almost, because there’s a lot of fake news about how masks are not helping the spread,” he says. “I think there’s just a sense of abandonment almost where we feel like we don’t have the support of our community; this individual selfishness that we’re seeing in society is really upsetting. And I think psychologically it’s really affecting a lot of my nurses and staff.” Some of them, he says, are so frustrated and worried about getting sick themselves that they’re not coming to work as much, calling in sick, or just cutting their hours.

Akhter thinks there are a lot of people in Arizona who still don’t believe Covid-19 is bad. “If their mother gets sick, even with non-Covid, with appendicitis, for example, what do they think is going to happen if there are no hospital beds? I don’t know what else to say other than, like, ‘What if your loved one gets sick, where do you think she’s gonna go?’”

Some of his colleagues in emergency and critical care medicine say they are already running out of ICU beds. “We have patients who are admitted to the ICU, but there isn’t a physical ICU bed for them,” says the ER doctor at Banner Health who asked not to be named. “So they physically stay in the ER. And they have been staying in the ER for over 24 hours because there is nowhere else for these patients to go. And then we’re using ventilators that have previously been retired, that are more likely to cause lung injury on patients, because, again, there’s no other option, no other way.”

The crunch on beds is getting so tight that Tucson Mayor Regina Romero recently told CNN that Pima County might have to send patients to other states for care. “Any day, we’re going to have to be sending patients to other states because of our lack of capacity,” she says.

Banner Health system, the largest hospital network in the state, says it has been able to expand capacity so far to keep up with the heightened demand from Covid-19 patients, moving them and resources between hospitals to keep volumes balanced and manageable. In recent weeks, it has also brought in about 400 travel nurses and respiratory therapists from out of state, spokesperson Becky Armendariz told Vox over email. But she didn’t rule out the possibility of exceeding capacity. “It is certainly possible for us to reach max capacity if the trend in cases continues.”

The only way to avoid that at this point, the doctors say, is for more people to start wearing face masks and for officials to enforce mandates at the city level.

“If Arizona does not mask up, we are in big, big trouble,” says the ICU doctor. “That’s the ground reality of the situation.”

Florida hospitals are walking a path “with a precipice on either side”

In terms of sheer numbers of new cases, Florida — the third most populous state in the country — has consistently been in the lead this summer, with a record high of 15,300 new daily cases on Saturday. (On Tuesday, the number of new daily cases fell to 10,101.) More than 4,400 Floridians have died due to the virus, with an average of 81 deaths per day in recent weeks.

According to Justin Senior — CEO of the Safety Net Hospital Alliance of Florida, which advocates on behalf of 14 hospitals in the state that provide care regardless of patients’ ability to pay — the state’s hospital capacity has not been reached yet and there will still be many hospital and ICU beds available if hospitalizations continue to rise rapidly.

Even so, Senior says hospitals are in a precarious place, “with a precipice on either side” as they try to juggle the needs of non-Covid-19 patients with the rising number of Covid-19 patients. If they postpone elective procedures, like certain surgeries, they lose revenue at a time when they’re still reeling from losing, by his estimate, $5 billion to $6 billion overall from March to May when the state shut down. If they don’t postpone those procedures, it’s harder to care for patients in a Covid-19 surge, he says.

“This is the path that the hospitals are trying to walk, because you don’t want another shutdown completely when there aren’t enough patients to avoid layoffs and avoid a really bad financial situation on one side, and of course, overcapacity and overtaxing of resources with too many Covid patients on the other side,” he says.

In Florida, Senior says, staff is the biggest concern for hospitals at the moment — in particular making sure that they don’t burn out and have enough PPE to stay protected from the coronavirus. “This is a really stressful situation, and there’s a real recognition of that.”

According to CBS Local in Miami, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has requested that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) send 1,500 nurses to the state to relieve the pressure on overworked hospital staff. “As of Monday morning, FEMA had not approved the request,” CBS reports. “DeSantis, meanwhile, said he is sending 100 nurses under contract with the state to Miami-Dade County.”

Some hospitals, particularly in Miami-Dade County, are already dialing back on some elective procedures to lessen the strain on staff and other resources. “The next step would be to declare surge capacity — this actually creates additional capacity by allowing a hospital to temporarily deal with an emergency by doubling up patient rooms and relaxing staffing ratios to exceed the hospital’s normal bed count,” he says. “You can’t keep that up for long. A final step would be to bring in field hospitals and significant outside resources.”

On Monday, Senior warned Vox that he was worried about hospitalizations exceeding 500 per day. “If daily hospitalizations shoot up over 500 a day, there will be serious stress ahead,” he says. “800 or 1,000 and it will be a wild ride.”

Unfortunately, the state is heading in that direction. On Tuesday, Florida hit 533 hospitalizations:

Tallahassee Reports/Florida Department of Health

“If it grows exponentially from here, there’s no denying, you know, we’re gonna have to relook at everything at the beginning of August,” Senior notes.

Texas hospitals warn they are running out of staff, PPE, drugs, and other supplies

Texas hospitals thought they had already seen the worst of Covid-19 in the spring. This latest surge has surpassed that first surge several times over.

During the first wave, from late February to early May, Houston Methodist Hospital peaked with about 250 coronavirus patients. Today, they have nearly 700. “There are too many Covid patients, full stop,” Roberta Schwartz, executive vice president at Houston Methodist, told me. “We ran full before, we’re running full-plus now.”

Their experience mirrors the statewide trends: Hospitalizations in Texas had topped out at about 1,800 in early May, but now, after cases began to accelerate dramatically, they’ve surpassed 10,000.

“Every day, or every other day, we’re turning another unit of this hospital into Covid units,” Schwartz says. “It’s slowly starving out the other services that we offer.”

She ticked through the list: Half a dozen of the hospitals’ medical surgical units are now being used to house Covid-19. An orthopedics unit has been shut down and flipped for patients who require high-oxygen flow. Cardiology units have also shortened their surgery schedules so that their space can be used for the coronavirus surge.

Schwartz and John Henderson, president and CEO of the Texas Organization of Rural and Community Hospitals, say their hospitals are in better shape now with personal protective equipment than they were in March and April.

But that could change as the crisis gets worse. Schwartz says her facilities have sometimes had trouble getting gowns and disinfectant wipes. Henderson says he “got a couple of SOS calls this week.”

Staffing is a universal problem. Houston Methodist has already brought in out-of-state nurses and asked its administrative staff with nursing certifications to start doing medical work again. Nurses are also being asked to work longer and overnight shifts.

Rural hospitals in Texas aren’t running out of beds yet, but they are running into a staffing shortage. These facilities might typically have five patients in a given unit, and the hospitals have staffed them accordingly. But now, there might be as many as 20 patients.

“You’re working every nurse as much as you can work them and still not meeting the need,” Henderson says.

It’s not clear where more staff could come from. The state has already sent about 2,300 volunteers to the Rio Grande Valley, one of the hardest-hit areas in the state.

“Other areas are requesting that workforce support,” Henderson says. “But there’s not much more in terms of resources to be sent.”

Another concern is ventilators. Rural hospitals in Texas would ordinarily transfer their patients in serious condition, the kind who might be on a ventilator for days, to a larger hospital in the city. But because urban hospitals are already overrun with Covid-19 patients themselves, there is nowhere for the rural hospitals to send their patients. Instead, they are forced to keep those patients, causing their beds to fill up even more quickly.

And while the current coronavirus patients are younger than those seen in the spring, Henderson says his hospitals don’t have enough of the nasal oxygen hookups that are used to help those patients breathe on their own and prevent them from being put on a ventilator.

“They’ve shown to be effective but everybody’s trying to get them,” he says.

Hospitals are putting lessons from the early weeks of the crisis to use. Remdesivir, an antiviral treatment prescribed to Covid-19 patients with low blood oxygen or who need breathing assistance from a mechanical ventilator, is protocol now. The University Health System in San Antonio, which got firsthand experience in the initial wave when it was asked to treat some of the first patients from Wuhan and the Diamond Princess cruise ship, has adapted its standard of care to include remdesivir, anti-inflammatory drugs, and putting patients on their stomachs to help them breathe. They have also reduced their use of ventilators, only using them when absolutely necessary.

But those improvements in treatment require adequate staffing and supplies to implement them. And as the crisis grows, supples are starting to run low.

“We still don’t have a steady stream of enough remdesivir,” Schwartz at Houston Methodist says.

That is the situation on the ground as of early July. Cases are continuing to climb in Texas, and more people are expected to end up in the hospital as a result. The emergency plan to set up temporary facilities in convention centers or sports venues is suddenly on the table.

Hospitals like Memorial Hermann in Houston have already activated their surge capacity plans, but that might not be enough if current trends continue.

“We remain concerned about the current growth rate in new cases and the demand for hospitalization, as we could reach the limit of our surge expansion plans if the current trends do not reverse,” Drew Munhausen, a spokesperson for the hospital, says in an email.

The hope is that new cases will start to level off soon, now that Gov. Abbott has reimposed some social distancing restrictions and established a statewide mask mandate. But for now, Texas hospitals are just waiting and hoping and preparing.

“If you’re counting hospital admissions and ICU patients on vents, you’re weeks behind. We’re chasing it right now,” Henderson says. “There’s no optimism today for what the rest of July looks like.”

The worst-case scenario, in these moments, is that people will die who otherwise wouldn’t have because the shortage of beds or supplies or staff will lead to suboptimal care.

Even fear itself can be devastating to public health. As ProPublica and NBC News reported, the number of Houstonians dying at home has spiked in recent weeks, suggesting people who either had Covid-19 or another life-threatening condition didn’t make it to the hospital in time.

“When you are unable to take care of patients in the optimal circumstances, you do worry that you are not able to do as good of a job in not-optimal circumstances,” Schwartz says. “And we are about to get into not-optimal circumstances.”

It could be a difficult few weeks ahead. Youyang Gu’s Covid-19 Projections currently expects cases in Texas to peak at the beginning of August and deaths to peak in mid-August.

In Imperial County, California, a run on ventilators

El Centro Regional Medical Center in Imperial County, one of California’s biggest Covid-19 hot spots right now, has already brushed up against its worst-case scenario.

About 60 percent of the patients in the medical center were infected with the coronavirus as of last week, and there aren’t enough ventilators, Adolphe Edward, the hospital’s CEO, told Vox. The medical center serves a largely Hispanic community, with many patients who have diabetes or other preexisting conditions that make them more vulnerable to the virus and who require mechanical ventilator support for their breathing when the disease takes a turn for the worse.

The hospital recently saw its available ventilators dwindle to one. Edward convened an impromptu committee to evaluate the patients currently on ventilators so they could prioritize if another patient who needed one came through their door. They checked their lung capacity and considered whether they could risk taking one or two of the patients off the ventilator if the need arose.

Luckily, Edward figured out a workaround. He called another nearby hospital and asked if they had any ventilators available. They had two, which they shipped over to El Centro. For now, the machines are still there, though Edward says he and the other hospital have stayed in constant contact in case the ventilators need to be transferred again.

Edward sounds exasperated describing that makeshift solution and he wonders why the federal government hasn’t started manufacturing “half a million or a million” ventilators to meet the need that hospitals like his have.

“Somebody’s gotta figure that out,” he says. (The Trump administration signed contracts in April under the Defense Production Act that are supposed to yield a little fewer than 150,000 ventilators by the end of 2020.)

Statewide, only about 30 percent of all available units are currently in use, according to NPR. But there have been surges of patients in some regions like Imperial County that have nearly overwhelmed local hospitals. About 30 percent of ICU beds are still open statewide as well, but those numbers could start shrinking as the state outbreak shifts from the younger cohort less prone to serious complications to older people who are more likely to require hospitalization and ventilation.

A California plan to stockpile ventilators never materialized, and the available capacity could be stretched with the hardest-hit areas exporting their patients to facilities in other parts of the state.

El Centro Regional Medical Center is moving patients out of its building at a rate Edward would ordinarily have found unfathomable. During normal times, the hospital might send out one or two patients a day, he says. Nowadays, they’re averaging between six and eight.

“If you had told me at the beginning we’d be transferring that many patients, I would have told you: I don’t know what you’re drinking,” Edward says.

For the time being, hospitals elsewhere in the state have the extra space to accommodate them. But the worry is if the outbreak keeps spreading, that excess capacity will evaporate very quickly.

New Covid-19 cases and deaths in California are currently expected to peak by August or early September, according to Youyang Gu’s Covid-19 Projections, meaning the new surge has not peaked yet.

More hospitals could be faced with the kind of difficult decisions that Edward and his team were nearly forced to make.

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The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) is the EU's top court. As such, it regularly hands down judgments that cause seismic shifts in the legal landscape of the region. Sometimes, though, it makes decisions that can seem a little out of touch. Here, for example, is the CJEU judgment on a case that involved unauthorized uploads of videos to YouTube (pdf):

the Court ruled that, where a film is uploaded onto an online video platform without the copyright holder's consent, Directive 2004/48 [the 2004 EU Copyright Directive] does not oblige the judicial authorities to order the operator of the video platform to provide the email address, IP address or telephone number of the user who uploaded the film concerned. The directive, which provides for disclosure of the 'addresses' of persons who have infringed an intellectual property right, covers only the postal address.

What jumps out here is that platforms like YouTube only need to hand out the postal address of someone who uploaded unauthorized material. That seems rather 1990s, but the reasoning is quite straightforward and not at all backward-looking. When the EU copyright law was drawn up in 2003, the CJEU explains, there was no suggestion that "addresses" actually meant an email address, IP address or telephone number. Nor was it the case that EU politicians had never heard of these new-fangled things, and left them out through ignorance. People knew about IP addresses, yet chose not to mention them in the EU law, so the court ruled that "address" should only have its usual meaning, that is, postal address.

That's welcome news for people who upload material to online platforms, since they may not provide their postal addresses -- or if they do, they might provide incorrect ones. In these cases, without IP addresses or emails it will be hard for the copyright industry to do much against those making unauthorized uploads in the EU. However, that's not the end of the story. The full CJEU judgment concludes by noting:

although it follows from the foregoing considerations that the Member States are not obliged, under Article 8(2)(a) of Directive 2004/48, to provide for the possibility for the competent judicial authorities to order disclosure of the email address, telephone number or IP address of the persons referred to in that provision in proceedings concerning an infringement of an intellectual property right, the fact remains that the Member States have such an option. As is clear from the wording of Article 8(3)(a) of that directive, the EU legislature expressly provided for the possibility for the Member States to grant holders of intellectual property rights the right to receive fuller information, provided, however, that a fair balance is struck between the various fundamental rights involved and compliance with the other general principles of EU law, such as the principle of proportionality

In other words, the governments of the EU's Member States have the option of introducing local legislation that would give copyright companies the right to receive things like email and IP addresses. There is no appeal against CJEU's decision, which will now be used by the German courts to make a final judgment on the original case that was referred to the highest court for guidance. As a result, we can doubtless expect frenzied lobbying from the copyright world demanding that all the EU's national governments bring in legislation granting extra rights in order to prevent the end of civilization as we know it, etc. etc.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

Medical staff transfer a patient to another room at the United Memorial Medical Center’s Intensive Care Unit in Houston, Texas, on July 2. Covid-19 cases and hospitalizations have spiked since Texas reopened on May 1. | Go Nakamura/Getty Images

In the meantime, people with long-term Covid-19 complications are struggling to get care.

In late March, when Covid-19 was first surging, Jake Suett, a doctor of anesthesiology and intensive care medicine with the National Health Service in Norfolk, England, had seen plenty of patients with the disease — and intubated a few of them.

Then one day, he started to feel unwell, tired, with a sore throat. He pushed through it, continuing to work for five days until he developed a dry cough and fever. “Eventually, I got to the point where I was gasping for air literally doing nothing, lying on my bed.”

At the hospital, his chest X-rays and oxygen levels were normal — except he was gasping for air. After he was sent home, he continued to experience trouble breathing and developed severe cardiac-type chest pain.

Because of a shortage of Covid-19 tests, Suett wasn’t immediately tested; when he was able to get a test, more than a month after he got sick, it came back negative. PCR tests, which are most commonly used, can only detect acute infections, and because of testing shortages, not everyone has been able to get a test when they need one.

It’s now been 14 weeks since Suett’s presumed infection and he still has symptoms, including trouble concentrating, known as brain fog. (One recent study in Spain found that a majority of 841 hospitalized Covid-19 patients had neurological symptoms, including headaches and seizures.) “I don’t know what my future holds anymore,” Suett says.

Doctors have dismissed some of his ongoing symptoms. One doctor suggested his intense breathing difficulties might be related to anxiety. “I found that really surprising,” Suett says. “As a doctor, I wanted to tell people, ‘Maybe we’re missing something here.’” He’s concerned not just for himself, but that many Covid-19 survivors with long-term symptoms aren’t being acknowledged or treated.

Suett says that even if the proportion of people who don’t eventually fully recover is small, there’s still a significant population who will need long-term care — and they’re having trouble getting it. “It’s a huge, unreported problem, and it’s crazy no one is shouting this from rooftops.”

In the US, a number of specialized centers are popping up at hospitals to help treat — and study — ongoing Covid-19 symptoms. The most successful draw on existing post-ICU protocols and a wide range of experts, from pulmonologists to psychiatrists. Yet even as care improves, patients are also running into familiar challenges in finding treatment: accessing and being able to pay for it.

What’s causing these long-term symptoms?

Scientists are still learning about the many ways the virus that causes Covid-19 impacts the body — both during initial infection and as symptoms persist.

One of the researchers studying them is Michael Peluso, a clinical fellow in infectious diseases at the University of California San Francisco, who is currently enrolling Covid-19 patients in San Francisco in a two-year study to study the disease’s long-term effects. The goal is to better understand what symptoms people are developing, how long they last, and eventually, the mechanisms that cause them. This could help scientists answer questions like how antibodies and immune cells called T-cells respond to the virus, and how different individuals might have different immune responses, leading to longer or shorter recovery times.

At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, “the assumption was that people would get better, and then it was over,” Peluso says. “But we know from lots of other viral infections that there is almost always a subset of people who experience longer-term consequences.” He explains these can be due to damage to the body during the initial illness, the result of lingering viral infection, or because of complex immunological responses that occur after the initial disease.

“People sick enough to be hospitalized are likely to experience prolonged recovery, but with Covid-19, we’re seeing tremendous variability,” he says. It’s not necessarily just the sickest patients who experience long-term symptoms, but often people who weren’t even initially hospitalized.

That’s why long-term studies of large numbers of Covid-19 patients are so important, Peluso says. Once researchers can find what might be causing long-term symptoms, they can start targeting treatments to help people feel better. “I hope that a few months from now, we’ll have a sense if there is a biological target for managing some of these long-term symptoms.”

Lekshmi Santhosh, a physician lead and founder of the new post-Covid OPTIMAL Clinic at UCSF, says many of her patients are reporting the same kinds of problems. “The majority of patients have either persistent shortness of breath and/or fatigue for weeks to months,” she says.

Additionally, Timothy Henrich, a virologist and viral immunologist at UCSF who is also a principal investigator in the study, says that getting better at managing the initial illness may also help. “More effective acute treatments may also help reduce severity and duration of post-infectious symptoms.”

In the meantime, doctors can already help patients by treating some of their lingering symptoms. But the first step, Peluso explains, is not dismissing them. “It is important that patients know — and that doctors send the message — that they can help manage these symptoms, even if they are incompletely understood,” he says. “It sounds like many people may not be being told that.”

Long-term symptoms, long-term consequences

Even though we have a lot to learn about the specific damage Covid-19 can cause, doctors already know quite a bit about recovery from other viruses: namely, how complex and challenging a task long-term recovery from any serious infection can be for many patients.

Generally, it’s common for patients who have been hospitalized, intubated, or ventilated — as is common with severe Covid-19 — to have a long recovery. Being bed-bound can cause muscle weakness, known as deconditioning, which can result in prolonged shortness of breath. After a severe illness, many people also experience anxiety, depression, and PTSD.

A stay in the ICU not uncommonly leads to delirium, a serious mental disorder sometimes resulting in confused thinking, hallucinations, and reduced awareness of surroundings. But Covid-19 has created a “delirium factory,” says Santhosh at UCSF. This is because the illness has meant long hospital stays, interactions only with staff in full PPE, and the absence of family or other visitors.

Sergio Flores/Getty Images

Theodore Iwashyna, an ICU physician-scientist at the University of Michigan and VA Ann Arbor, is involved with the CAIRO Network, a group of 40 post-intensive care clinics on four continents. In general, after patients are discharged from ICUs, he says, “about half of people have some substantial new disability, and half will never get back to work. Maybe a third of people will have some degree of cognitive impairment. And a third have emotional problems.” And it’s common for them to have difficulty getting care for their ongoing symptoms after being discharged.

In working with Covid-19 patients, says Santhosh, she tells patients, “We believe you ... and we are going to work on the mind and body together.”

Yet it’s currently impossible to predict who will have long-lasting symptoms from Covid-19. “People who are older and frailer with more comorbidities are more likely to have longer physical recovery. However, I’ve seen a lot of young people be really, really sick,” Santhosh says. “They will have a long tail of recovery too.”

Who can access care?

At the new OPTIMAL Clinic at UCSF, doctors are seeing patients who were hospitalized for Covid-19 at the UCSF health system, as well as taking referrals of other patients with persistent pulmonary symptoms. For ongoing cough and chest tightness, the clinic is providing inhalers, as well as pulmonary rehabilitation, including gradual aerobic exercise with oxygen monitoring. They’re also connecting patients with mental health resources.

“Normalizing those symptoms, as well as plugging people into mental health care, is really critical,” says Santhosh, who is also the physician lead and founder of the clinic. “I want people to know this is real. It’s not ‘in their heads.’”

Neeta Thakur, a pulmonary specialist at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center who has been providing care for Covid-19 patients in the ICU, just opened a similar outpatient clinic for post-Covid care. Thakur has also arranged a multidisciplinary approach, including occupational and physical therapy, as well as expedited referrals to neurology colleagues for rehabilitation for the muscles and nerves that can often be compressed when patients are prone for long periods in the ICU. But she’s most concerned by the cognitive impairments she’s seeing, especially as she’s dealing with a lot of younger patients.

These California centers join new post-Covid-19 clinics in major cities across the country, including Mount Sinai in New York and National Jewish Health Hospital in Denver. As more and more hospitals begin to focus on post-Covid care, Iwashyna suggests patients try to seek treatment where they were hospitalized, if possible, because of the difficulty in transferring sufficient medical records.

Santosh recommends that patients with persistent symptoms call their closest hospital, or nearest academic medical center’s pulmonary division, and ask if they can participate in any clinical trials. Many of the new clinics are enrolling patients in studies to try to better understand the long-term consequences of the disease. Fortunately, treatment associated with research is often free, and sometimes also offers financial incentives to participants.

But otherwise, one of the biggest challenges in post-Covid-19 treatment is — like so much of American health care — being able to pay for it.

Outside of clinical trials, cost can be a barrier to treatment. It can be tricky to get insurance to cover long-term care, Iwashyna notes. After being discharged from an ICU, he says, “Recovery depends on [patients’] social support, and how broke they are afterward.” Many struggle to cover the costs of treatment. “Our patient population is all underinsured,” says Thakur, noting that her hospital works with patients to try to help cover costs.

Lasting health impacts can also affect a person’s ability to go back to work. In Iwashyna’s experience, many patients quickly run through their guaranteed 12 weeks of leave under the Family Medical and Leave Act, which isn’t required to be paid. Eve Leckie, a 39-year-old ICU nurse in New Hampshire, came down with Covid-19 on March 15. Since then, Leckie has experienced symptom relapses and still can’t even get a drink of water without help.

“I’m typing this to you from my bed, because I’m too short of breath today to get out,” they say. “This could disable me for the rest of my life, and I have no idea how much that would cost, or at what point I will lose my insurance, since it’s dependent on my employment, and I’m incapable of working.” Leckie was the sole wage earner for their five children, and was facing eviction when their partner “essentially rescued us,” allowing them to move in.

These long-term burdens are not being felt equally. At Thakur’s hospital in San Francisco, “The population [admitted] here is younger and Latinx, a disparity which reflects who gets exposed,” she says. She worries that during the pandemic, “social and structural determinants of health will just widen disparities across the board.” People of color have been disproportionately affected by the virus, in part because they are less likely to be able to work from home.

Black people are also more likely to be hospitalized if they get Covid-19, both because of higher rates of preexisting conditions — which are the result of structural inequality — and because of lack of access to health care.

“If you are more likely to be exposed because of your job, and likely to seek care later because of fear of cost, or needing to work, you’re more likely to have severe disease,” Thakur says. “As a result, you’re more likely to have long-term consequences. Depending on what that looks like, your ability to work and economic opportunities will be hindered. It’s a very striking example of how social determinants of health can really impact someone over their lifetime.”

If policies don’t support people with persistent symptoms in getting the care they need, ongoing Covid-19 challenges will deepen what’s already a clear crisis of inequality.

Iwashyna explains that a lot of extended treatment for Covid-19 patients is “going to be about interactions with health care systems that are not well-designed. The correctable problems often involve helping people navigate a horribly fragmented health care system.

“We can fix that, but we’re not going to fix that tomorrow. These patients need help now.”

Lois Parshley is a freelance investigative journalist and the 2019-2020 Snedden Chair of Journalism at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Follow her Covid-19 reporting on Twitter @loisparshley.

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Clarisonic announced its shutting down officially September 30th, 2020, and they’ve put everything 50% off (while supplies last). Per the brand, they are shutting down so that their parent, L’Oreal, can “focus [their] attention on other core business offerings.” The brand will be cleared out through their website as well as authorized retailers, which include:

• Amazon
• Costco
• QVC
• Sephora
• Ulta

They will continue to honor warranties through October 31, 2022, and you can get a breakdown of how long the warranty term is per device here.  They highly recommend to stock up on brush heads if you expect to continue to use your Clarisonic device(s) into the future as they will not continue to produce them. If you purchase a product, make sure to register your device by September 30th, 2020 online or through their app by October 31st, 2020.

Goodbye, Clarisonic | Brand Shuts Down September 30th

Goodbye, Clarisonic | Brand Shuts Down September 30th

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As was widely expected, the NFL team based in Washington DC, formerly using the "Redskins" as their team name, will be renaming themselves after years of people pointing out that the name is racist, and the team being so obnoxious that it has literally sued native Americans who had previously sought to cancel the team's trademark. Either way, what finally got the Dan Snyder-owned team to ditch the name was... money, of course. The biggest sponsors of the team began to threaten to pull support, and that finally convinced Snyder to do something he should have done a long time ago.

Of course, the story that many are focusing on following the official announcement to find a new name is... the fact that some dude has been busy filing trademark applications on a bunch of possible replacement names.

And if you don't understand trademark law, that might sound legit, except that none of this is getting in the way of the team picking a new name. We've talked in the past about how people always try to rush in and trademark stuff in hopes of getting some crazy payday, but that's not how trademark law works. You can apply for any trademark (though the costs will add up) but you're unlikely to get it unless you have actual plans to use it in commerce and you're not just registering it as a troll.

To his credit, Philip Martin McCauley at least claims that he understands all this and has even set up a website (which I'm not linking to) which offers merchandise featuring the logos of his totally fake Washington DC football team names. That at least gives him a modicum more defensibility than your everyday trademark troll.

United States law requires that the holder of a trademark actually use the term in question.

McCaulay is aware of the provision, which is why he’s spent thousands of dollars creating team merchandise to back up his claims.

In doing so, he said he’s no ordinary trademark squatter, a term with negative connotation used in similar situations.

“A squatter reserves a name with no intention to use it,” McCaulay said. “I went to the extreme of buying a lot of merchandise, making it my brand, and selling it.”

But the idea that this will, in any way, prevent the actual football team from choosing a name it likes is pretty silly. Perhaps the team would pay off McCauley just to avoid the hassle, but it won't be because of any legitimate claim to the trademark -- just a pure nuisance fee to avoid bad press and wasteful litigation. And, to be honest, Dan Snyder has never struck me as someone who cares much about avoiding bad press or wasteful litigation.

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New York’s hungry rats torment alfresco diners after lockdown famine

People lie in social distancing circles at Dolores Park in San Francisco, California, on May 24. | Liu Guanguan/China News Service/Getty Images

What’s the best — and riskiest — way to see friends, take a trip, or get spiffed up? We talked to experts to find out.

As the coronavirus pandemic drags on, many of us are feeling desperate to see friends and family in person, keep kids busy, and get the heck out of town. And it’s extremely tempting to shed our crusty quarantine skins of spring and seize a glorious, social summer.

But should we?

It can be difficult to know since the situation across the US varies so much, as this map of county-level risk based on the number of new daily cases, from Harvard’s Global Health Institute and Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, shows:

Harvard Global Health Institute

Meanwhile, guidance on the safest way to enjoy socializing, playgrounds, and vacations is inconsistent. States, towns, and cities are not uniformly enforcing — or even encouraging — safest practices as they lift (or in some cases, reinstate) coronavirus restrictions.

But one pattern is clear: As some places have relaxed social distancing measures before getting the virus under control, their case numbers have surged. Which suggests that there are probably many things, like packing together in indoor bars, that we shouldn’t be doing — even if they are technically permitted.

“The Covid-19 situation in the US has changed over the past couple of weeks to the extent that no one should be out without a mask, and everyone should be trying to distance as much as feasible, even if retail [and other businesses] are opening up,” Krysia Lindan, a clinical epidemiologist at the University of California San Francisco, wrote in an email to Vox.

Public health experts were particularly worried about the 4th of July holiday because they say Memorial Day weekend festivities helped seed the current outbreaks in places like Arizona and Texas. “I’m very concerned ... that the same types of spikes and surges could be seen not just in the places that are currently experiencing surges but in places that have already experienced surges, and in ones that haven’t yet,” Josh Barocas, an assistant professor of medicine at Boston University and an infectious diseases physician at Boston Medical Center, said in a recent Infectious Diseases Society of America briefing.

Getting out and about is risky in large part because “people can transmit the virus before they start feeling symptoms,” says Eleanor Murray, an epidemiologist at the Boston University School of Public Health. By some estimates, about one in five people who get the virus never develop symptoms. And for those who do end up getting sick, many have the highest level of virus in their bodies before they start feeling ill. So, Murray says, “we can’t just rely on how we’re feeling today.” Or, for that matter, how the people around us are feeling.

If you’re in one of the higher-risk orange or red counties in the Harvard map above, sheltering in place is probably the safest move. If you’re in a yellow or green county, you may be ready to venture out, and might be asking: What’s the safest way to have an outdoor get-together with some friends? Is it okay to travel this summer? I lost a tooth filling in April — is it safe to go to the dentist?

I checked in with experts about the best and worst ways to do seven common things this summer, and here’s what they told me. (Risk is ranked only for each category, so a “moderate risk” option for one category might not carry the same level of risk as a “moderate risk” option for a different category.)

Get out of town

The first thing to know is that traveling from a high-risk area to (or through) a low-risk one increases the chances that you will spread the virus to places where more people might be out and about. “I don’t want to encourage anyone to think that gallivanting around during the summer is a good idea,” Lindan says.

Safest: Camp

Be sure to camp — and hike — at least 6 feet from others. Make plans and reservations ahead of time, and bring disinfecting supplies.

To get there, “drive with people in your household and who you know who are either uninfected or have been unexposed and/or safely practicing social distancing for two weeks,” Lindan says. Keep in mind that using public bathrooms, especially those that might not be cleaned super-regularly or those that are very busy, ups the risk for transmitting the virus. “Wash your hands after using the toilet, and always use a mask,” Lindan notes.

Next safest: Get a vacation rental

“Find out how long since the rental was last occupied and what type of cleaning has been done between guests,” Lindan says. If other people were staying there more recently than 72 hours before your arrival, make sure surfaces have been wiped down. (The common booking site VRBO has detailed cleaning guidelines for property owners, and Airbnb has a cleaning commitment hosts can make — or opt for a 72-hour buffer window between guests.) Also, drive there, using the above precautions.

Moderate risk: Hotels

“Find out what precautions the hotel is taking,” Lindan says. Hotels should be using enhanced cleaning protocols; staff should be wearing masks and being tested regularly, and if anyone has tested positive there, staff who were in close contact should follow local health department instructions. And add one more item to your packing list: “Bring your own disinfectant and use it,” Lindan says.

Riskier: Traveling by plane

The level of risk likely depends on several things, Lindan says: how crowded the plane is, how long the flight is, where you are traveling from and to, and how busy the airports are. Before you fly, “ask the airline how far apart the passengers will be seated,” she notes (ideally it would be at least 6 feet), as well as what type of cleaning they are doing between flights (an industry group has released aircraft cleaning guidelines, but it is up to individual carriers to implement them and determine if every step is completed for each new group of passengers or just during longer stops). Also, she says to aim for a window seat with no one next to or behind you. Although that might not be possible on all flights now, as some major airlines have announced that they will once again start booking entirely full flights.

Takeaways

Before you leave your area, look to see how much the virus is spreading there, where you are hoping to go, and any places you will pass through along the way. Murray advises that no one should be traveling to or from the hardest-hit areas of Arizona right now, for example (and probably Texas, Florida, and many other Sunbelt states). Traveling from a low-risk area to (or through) a high-risk one means you will be more likely to pick up the virus, so not only will you be more likely to get sick, but you might also bring it back to your community when you return home.

See older folks, like parents and grandparents, or other high-risk people

Safest: Virtual visit

“Call, email, or communicate through one of the services that allow you to see and hear each other virtually,” Nancy Nielsen, a dean for health policy at the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at the University of Buffalo and former president of the American Medical Association, wrote in an email. If you are wanting to connect with someone who is in an assisted living facility, inpatient facility, or hospital, many of those places can help you get set up with a virtual chat — in part because it also helps them keep risks lower.

Next safest: Outdoors

Especially if you are visiting someone who lives in an assisted living facility, try to arrange a way to visit outdoors away from others who might be high-risk, such as people 65 and older. But if you must visit near the facility, “You would for sure always want to be wearing a mask and keeping 6 feet of distance as possible,” Murray says.

Moderate risk: In-home visit

This option depends a lot on how well everyone involved has been keeping up best practices of distancing (and how widely the virus is spreading in the area). “This is the question you need to ask yourself,” Lindan says. “If you are not being safe by not wearing a mask and avoiding crowds, do you want to infect and potentially kill your grandmother? If you haven’t been very careful in the previous two weeks, then don’t put your elderly relatives at risk — do a Zoom call.”

Riskier: Traveling to stay

This one depends on the above factors but also on where people are coming from and going to, as well as how likely you (or they) are to have been exposed to the virus, Murray says. For example, if you are an essential worker or health care professional, she advises a 14-day quarantine (staying at home and avoiding contact with others) first. Or if traveling there involves contact with lots of other people, she suggests planning on a 14-day self-isolation period (no contact with others) nearby before going to their home. Lindan agrees: “If you are visiting them for a long period, be sure to have self-isolated for two weeks beforehand or be very careful about your social distancing.”

Riskiest: Indoors at a care facility

“The highest risk would be actually visiting a retirement home where there are a lot of elderly people in an enclosed space,” Murray says.

Takeaways

Be especially cautious if you are seeing older people or others with higher risk for severe Covid-19 complications. And you can do other things to stay connected with these folks that doesn’t involve being in the same room, says Nielsen. “Shop for them, depositing groceries outside their front door.” Or say hi through a closed window.

And definitely skip large groups. “This is not a good time for family gatherings,” says Nielsen. And it’s something we will need to accept for many months to come. “Those may not be very safe until a safe and effective vaccine is available,” Nielsen says. We only have to look to the May surprise birthday party with 25 guests (hosted by a presymptomatic carrier) that ended up spreading Covid-19 to 18 people — including two people in their 80s and one person with cancer — and sent many to the hospital, to see how easily the virus can spread at a gathering, putting older relatives (and others) at risk.

Get routine medical care

Safest: Routine medical visits

“If you need a physical exam or Pap smear, get one,” Lindan says. Make sure that the office or facility you visit is cleaning all surfaces, has providers using N95 masks, and screening patients for Covid-19 (and keeping those who might be positive away from other patients), she notes.

Safer: Dental procedures

“Dentists have been using masks and eye shields for a long time, so going to a dentist is probably fine,” Lindan says. Especially for the patient. (“The risk is more to the dentist or dental hygienist than to you, because of aerosols and droplets that are inevitable during procedures,” Nielsen says.)

Moderate risk: Eye appointments

“It depends on what the ophthalmologist is doing,” Lindan says. If they are taking the best safety precautions, including disinfecting everything (surfaces, instruments, etc.), and wearing gloves and an N95 mask, that makes it safer. (The American Optometric Association has put out guidelines for best practices for the field.) But “given there is a lot of potential eye contact with the instruments, hands, etc., and that Covid-19 can be transmitted to the [mucous membrane of the eye], this might be higher risk,” Lindan says. “Of course, if you have an urgent eye problem, you [will] have to be evaluated.”

Takeaways

“Go now for those medical and dental services you’ve been putting off,” Nielsen says. “Medical and dental offices are acutely aware of risk,” she says. Everyone should be wearing a mask at all times — except for the time you might need to take one off to have your nose or mouth examined. These visits should be safe and can be essential for maintaining other important areas of health. For her part, Nielsen says, “Go for the elective surgery, Pap smears, physicals, eye exams you’ve postponed.” (There is a chance, though, that as Covid-19 case numbers spike in some areas, elective procedures will be put on hold to maintain hospital capacity.)

See friends

Safest: Virtual hangouts

You might have video chat fatigue by now, but it is still the absolute safest answer for socializing with those outside of your household, Nielsen says.

Next safest: Outside gathering

“Getting together in person is more soul-satisfying, of course,” Nielsen says. And you don’t need expansive empty parks for this. You can sit on a friend’s porch or patio so long as you can safely stay at least 6 feet apart. If there is food or drink, people should bring their own. And definitely avoid anything shared or in a buffet style. Also: “No hugs or handshakes!” Nielsen says.

If you’re considering ducking inside a friend’s home to use the bathroom, the riskiness of that depends on how closely those in the home — and you — have been following physical distancing. If you decide all have been adhering well, it should be okay — just wear a mask, wash your hands well, and thoroughly disinfect surfaces before you leave the room.

Should you wear masks when you see friends outdoors? Lindan says that “if you’re outside with a friend who has been cautious and probably not exposed, you probably don’t have to wear a mask” if you keep up physical distancing. But that is something to be mindful of, because staying physically far enough apart from someone you know well is difficult — even if you’re both trying your best. “It’s difficult to maintain these social distances,” Lindan says. “It’s not how we live as humans.”

But distance and fresh air don’t necessarily prevent the spread of the virus. “Spewing respiratory droplets over a longer distance can occur if someone has a vigorous cough,” Lindan says, or if people are talking loudly or singing — even outdoors.

Moderate risk: Inside a home

The level of risk here is strongly tied to how careful you and your friend (and whoever else you and they live with or see regularly) are being. If everyone has been extremely careful, you might be able to “wear a mask until all are safely distanced, then don them again if you’ll pass people closely,” Nielsen says. (Lindan goes so far as to suggest that “if they are not maintaining social distancing or wearing a mask when outside, then maybe they are not your friends.”) But still no hugs, handshakes, or shared foods.

Riskier: Meal at a restaurant

“Sit outside if possible,” Nielsen says. The restaurant should have tables spaced at least 6 feet apart. The staff should be masked, “as should all guests until beginning to eat or drink,” she says.

Riskiest: Crowded bar or event

As far as bars are concerned, Lindan says, “don’t go into them ... unless you can drink outside at a distance from others.” Even if you enter with a mask on, you and others will take masks off to drink. “Plus, getting intoxicated is likely to result in less ability to continue to be safe,” she says. “It is likely that upticks in cases in some places are the result of parties and bars.”

Add to this that “it’s more than the lack of social distancing,” Nielsen says. “It’s that speaking loudly, shouting, cheering, etc., have much more potential for droplet spread” that could spread the virus.

Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases echoed these sentiments at his June 30 Senate hearing: “Bars: really not good,” he said. “Congregation at a bar, inside, is bad news. We really have got to stop that.”

Takeaways

The bottom line: “Nothing has changed about precautions to prevent yourself and others from becoming infected,” Lindan says. “Wear a mask at all times that you are out, except when you are eating or drinking, which ideally would occur at least 6 feet away from others in your ‘safe’ group. Clean/disinfect your hands. Being outside for activities, for seeing friends, and for eating is better than inside.”

Keep children busy

Safest: Home — or outdoors with household members

Everyone might be stir-crazy by now and very tired of one another. But keeping children with members of the household is the safest for not just preventing them from getting sick (which does happen) but also to reduce the chances of their spreading the virus to others (data on this is still evolving).

Safer: Playgrounds

A quiet playground, especially one that has just been cleaned, could potentially be okay (especially if transmission in your area is low). Adults and children over 2 should wear masks and maintain physical distancing, and everyone should disinfect hands frequently. “You can try to clean off playground equipment before your child uses it, but it’s probably easier to periodically clean your child’s hands while they are at the playground,” Lindan says.

Moderate risk: Play dates

To keep play dates safest, limit the number of kids and families involved — ideally to just one other family that you trust to be keeping up good distancing practices. Perhaps most important is to “be aware of what the parents are doing,” Lindan says. “Parents pose the most risk. So avoid kibitzing in close proximity with parents whose social distancing practices you are unaware of and who aren’t wearing masks.” Also, ask other parents to wear masks when they are around your children.

Riskier: Camps

Lindan recommends trying to avoid sleepaway camps for now because it is hard to be sure counselors and other staff have all been distancing and wearing masks outside of their time with the children. “Camp experiences that are based outdoors and with smaller groups of children are better compared to an [indoor] computer camp, for example,” she says.

Takeaways

Any activity with children is particularly tricky because, especially with very young children, they are unlikely to be able to follow all of the health recommendations (staying away from other people, not touching common surfaces, wearing a mask correctly, etc.).

A lot remains to be learned about the rate at which children transmit the virus to one another and to adults. And although children do not seem to experience more typical severe Covid-19 infections as frequently as adults do, they can still get very sick and die as a result of the virus.

Get a personal treatment

Safest: DIY

Want a haircut? Manicure? Back massage? “The safest thing to do would be to do it at home or have a roommate or housemate do it for you,” Murray says.

Next safest: Quick haircut

Murray suggests this could be fairly safe “if you’re getting a 15-minute haircut, especially if you’re all wearing masks and you’re 6 feet away from other clients,” she says.

Moderate risk: Manicure or pedicure

These should be done with a plexiglass shield between the client and aesthetician, Murray notes. Also: Everyone should be wearing masks, and clients should be spaced far apart. If you’re deciding between the two nail services, “a pedicure may be somewhat safer than a manicure, since you’re not so close to one another, and you are unlikely to touch your face with your feet,” Lindan says. But it’s not entirely about the extremity you choose. “Think about how long you are going to be there and in close proximity to other clients and staff,” she says.

Eva Marie Uzcategui Trinkl/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Riskier: Lengthier hair treatments

Dyeing, relaxing, and other longer-duration hair treatments up the risk simply because you’re spending longer indoors in a salon. “You might not be in such close contact with [a stylist], but you are going to be in their studio for a long time,” Murray says.

Murray also adds to this category of risk: massages and body waxing, like leg waxes (“if you yell when they pull the wax off, it’s more risky for the person doing the procedure,” she says. “And it can take a long time.”) Nielsen also suggests tattoos are in this level of risk “due to proximity and prolonged encounter time, even when masks are worn by all.”

Riskiest: Eyebrow and face waxing

“I would discourage people from getting their face waxed at all,” Murray says. Really any face-based treatment falls in this category, including other eyebrow services, facials, or a shave.

Regardless of the treatment, says Lindan, “make sure that all instruments have been sterilized between clients (which should be done regardless), that you and the staff are wearing masks properly and washing hands.”

Get around without a car

Safest: Walking or cycling

The fresh air and not being in sustained proximity to others helps to minimize risk — especially if most everyone is wearing masks when passing close to others.

Next safest: Private ride-hail or taxi

“The idea would be that it’s just you and the driver, and you could wipe down surfaces that you would touch and wash your hands afterward — and both be wearing masks,” Murray says. You can also keep the windows open to increase air circulation.

Moderate risk: Quiet bus or metro

“They may be reasonably safe,” Murray says. “If you’re the only person in the subway car, you’re probably fine.” But follow the same good hygiene practices that you probably should use in public transportation anyway: Don’t touch anything you don’t absolutely have to, clean off your hands as soon as you can — and don’t touch your face before you can do so. And when there are a handful of other people, “sit far apart from other passengers,” Lindan adds.

Riskiest: Crowded bus or metro

“If it starts to look like commuting hours used to, where people are squishing in, you definitely don’t want to get in,” Murray says.

Make the summer safer for everyone

Most of these activity evaluations depend on whom you are seeing and where you are. “It’s hard to make gradations of risk,” Lindan says. “It depends on what your friends have been doing, and it depends on the transmission in the community.”

Before we see anyone these days, it should be part of the new routine to let them know if we are feeling well and if we have traveled in the past two weeks anywhere where Covid-19 cases are prevalent, Nielsen says.

It is easy to find out what case levels are like in your area by going to your local health department’s website, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Covid-19 Data Tracker, or checking the rate of positive tests available from Johns Hopkins. “Become informed!” Lindan says. “It’s not difficult.”

German Lopez/Vox

The lesson is that life is very different this summer. And even though some activities are allowed — and even if we see friends and family members engaging in them — that doesn’t mean we should take part. In fact, says Murray, “The types of things people should be doing are the same things they should have been doing since February or March.” These include keeping distance from others, wearing a mask, washing hands frequently with soap and water, and avoiding touching shared surfaces.

This isn’t just to help you avoid getting the virus, which, as Murray notes, “sounds very bad even for mild cases.” It is to help stop the spread of the virus to others and ultimately slow the runaway pandemic.

Or, as Lindan puts it: “You cannot drive 100 miles per hour on the highway. Even if you want to risk killing yourself, it’s not acceptable to kill others. The same is true for Covid-19.”

So for everyone’s sake, try to summer safely.

Katherine Harmon Courage is a freelance science journalist and the author of Cultured and Octopus! Find her on Twitter at @KHCourage.

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Reverse warrants are being challenged in a criminal case involving a bank robbery in Virginia. These warrants (also called "geofence warrants") work in reverse, hence the nickname. Rather than seeking to search property belonging to a known suspect, investigators approach Google with a demand for information on all cellphones in a certain location at a certain time and work backwards from this stash to determine who to pursue as a suspect.

Warrants require probable cause. And there doesn't seem to be much in the way of specific probable cause supporting these fishing expeditions. In this case, a bank was robbed in the late afternoon, resulting in plenty of people unrelated to the robbery being in the vicinity. This is all it takes to turn random people into suspects. And that has gone badly for investigators and, more importantly, innocent citizens on more than one occasion.

Accused bank robber Okello Chatrie is challenging the reverse warrant that led to his arrest and indictment on federal charges. Chatrie hopes that warrant will be found deficient because it will make it easier to undo the damage he seemingly inflicted on himself after he was taken into custody.

In Chatrie’s case, bank cameras showed the robber came and went from an area where a church worker saw a suspicious person in a blue Buick. Chatrie’s location history matched these movements. Prosecutors say Chatrie confessed after officers found a gun and nearly $100,000 in cash, including bills wrapped in bands signed by the bank teller.

Chatrie first moved to suppress this warrant late last year, arguing [PDF] that it's impossible for a warrant that targets no one in particular to contain the necessary probable cause for the search of Google's location records.

This is no ordinary warrant. It is a general warrant purporting to authorize a classic dragnet search of every Google user who happened to be near a bank in suburban Richmond during rush hour on a Monday evening. This is the kind of investigatory tactic that the Fourth Amendment was designed to guard against. Geofence warrants like the one in this case are incapable of satisfying the probable cause and particularity requirements, making them unconstitutional general warrants.

His motion also points out that the location info gathered by Google via the Android operating system is far more precise than cell site location info gathered by cell service providers.

[T]he location data available in Google’s Sensorvault is even more precise than the data in Carpenter. Google can pinpoint an individual’s location to approximately 20 meters compared to “a few thousand meters” for cell site location data...

In this case, investigators received "anonymized" data on nineteen cellphones that were in the area at the time of the robbery. From there, investigators determined Chatrie to be the most likely suspect. That's detailed in the warrant application [PDF] for a search of Chatrie's Google accounts.

Based upon Google's return of anonymized information, your Affiant discovered a Google account that: (1) was near the corner of Journey Christian Church prior to the robbery at approximately 4:30 to 4:40 p.m. -- the time period [redacted] recalled encountering a suspicious individual wearing reflective glasses in a blue Buick sedan; (2) was near the southwestern corner of Journey Christian Church prior to the robbery at approximately 4:48 p.m.; (3) was inside the Credit Union during the time of the robbery; and (4) immediately left the area following the robbery, leaving from the southwestern corner of Journey Christian Church.

Chatrie filed a supplemental suppression motion [PDF] in May of this year. This one expands on points previously made, as well as adding new information gathered from a few rounds of discovery. It opens with this statement, again characterizing reverse warrants as general warrants forbidden by the Fourth Amendment -- something that doesn't become acceptable just because investigators don't have any immediate leads.

Local police had no suspects in the robbery of the Call Federal Credit Union, so they decided to enlist Google to sleuth for them. Investigators went to a Virginia magistrate and, without conveying critical information, obtained a staggeringly broad and unparticularized warrant to go fishing in a pool of private location data that most people have never heard of. They demanded the location information associated with all Google users who happened to be in the vicinity of the bank during rush hour on a Monday evening, and thus, caused Google to search numerous tens of millions of accounts at their behest.

As the motion notes, the Supreme Court has said historical cell site data is protected by the Fourth Amendment, requiring the use of a warrant to obtain it. Even though there was a warrant involved here, it did not satisfy the particularity needed to justify this search of Fourth Amendment-protected records.

While the government obtained a warrant in this case, it did not obtain one for Mr. Chatrie’s Location History data. In fact, it did not seek anyone’s data in particular. Rather, the government compelled Google to search everyone’s data in order to develop an investigative lead. This warrant was unconstitutional. It was both overbroad and lacking in particularly, a forbidden general warrant purporting to authorize a dragnet search of Google users. It did not—and could not— satisfy the Fourth Amendment’s probable cause and particularity requirements, rendering it wholly impermissible and void from the beginning.

The government's response [PDF] portrays Google as nothing more than a nearby resident who could be approached with the proper paperwork to compel it to disclose what it "saw."

The investigators were correct: Google had been a witness to the robbery. Pursuant to the warrant, Google produced to the United States a small set of records: location information over a two-hour interval of three identified and six unidentified individuals, and limited location information over a one-hour interval of ten other unidentified individuals. This information was sufficient for investigators to recognize that the defendant’s Google account likely belonged to the robber, and subsequent investigation led to his indictment.

The government says the Carpenter decision doesn't apply because -- unlike cell location data gathered by service providers -- users must opt in to allowing Google to collect their location data. The argument is an old one: that a person's agreement to share data with a company is an agreement to share data with a government.

Google could not obtain and store the defendant’s location without his undertaking multiple affirmative acts. He had to opt in to Location History in his account settings, and he had to enable Location Reporting for his phone. The defendant had discretion regarding whether Google stored his location information, and he retained the ability to delete it. And none of the services associated with Google’s storage of location information are indispensable to participation in modern society. The defendant thus voluntarily disclosed his location information to Google, and Google’s conveyance of that information to the United States did not infringe his reasonable expectation of privacy.

The government also argues that a warrant targeting nothing more than anonymized data is still somehow particular. It says warrant affidavits only need to show there's a probability that evidence will be found in the place searched.

In particular, the affidavit established: (1) that an unknown subject committed an armed bank robbery at a particular place and time; (2) that prior to the robbery, the robber held a cell phone to his ear and appeared to be speaking with someone; (3) that the majority of cell phones were smartphones; (4) that “[n]early every” Android phone “has an associated Google account,” and that Google “collects and retains location data” from such devices when the account owner enables Google location services; and (5) that Google can collect location information from non-Android smartphones if the devices are “registered to a Google account and the user has location services enabled.” From this information, there was a substantial basis for the magistrate to find probable cause to believe that Google possessed evidence related to the robbery.

The defendant argues that the warrant lacked probable cause because it “did not identify any individuals or accounts to be searched because investigators did not know who they were searching for, or even if Google would have relevant data.” However, a warrant for evidence of crime need not identify specific individuals or establish with certainty that evidence will be found—all it must do is establish a fair probability that specified evidence will be found in the place to be searched.

The judge has yet to rule on this suppression attempt. The government's arguments seek to turn a broad warrant into something that "narrowly" targets what may be a very large data subset collected and stored by Google. The implications of claiming everyone who uses Google's location services voluntarily waives their privacy right in this information are far-ranging and somewhat opposed to the Supreme Court's Carpenter decision. While the Supreme Court only delivered a narrow ruling on the warrantless acquisition of several days of cell site location info, it pointedly did not state this was the only way this decision should be applied. Other courts have already found Carpenter's reasoning capable of covering third-party records not explicitly discussed in that decision.

Finally, also of interest in the reporting on this case is that reverse warrants are the target of legislation in New York. And we have, of all people, the Proud Boys, to thank for it.

“If you are someone who went out on the streets to express your rage, your sadness and your hope that there is a better way to do policing and are then subject to a warrant, I think that would go against everything we are telling people they have the right to do,” said New York state Sen. Zellnor Myrie, a lead sponsor of a bill to ban geofence warrants.

The legislation was prompted in part by a New York Times report that prosecutors sought Google’s cellphone records around the spot where the Proud Boys, a far-right group, brawled with anti-fascist protesters in 2018. Several Proud Boys were later convicted of assault.

If this challenge ends up in a federal appeals court, more attention will be drawn to these questionable warrants that allow investigators to treat everyone in an area as a suspect by leveraging data many cellphone users may not realize is being collected and stored. And, because this is a relatively new investigative option, judges aren't being provided with all the details needed to make informed decisions, which is going to result in even more collateral damage in the future if courts don't start doing something about this now.

Roger Stone leaves federal court on November 15, 2019, after being found guilty for obstructing a congressional investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. | Win McNamee/Getty Images

Stone was convicted for lying to Congress and witness tampering in the Mueller probe.

President Donald Trump has commuted Roger Stone’s prison sentence in a stunning exercise of presidential power that is not altogether unexpected.

Stone, a longtime Republican operative, was convicted in November 2019 for obstructing a congressional investigation, lying to Congress, and witness tampering in a trial that stemmed from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. On February 20, Stone was sentenced to 40 months in prison.

Trump’s commutation landed just days before Stone was expected to report to prison on July 14.

The commutation stops short of a full pardon. The conviction will remain on Stone’s record — for now, at least. But the Trump ally won’t have to serve his approximately three-year prison term.

The White House issued a long statement on the commutation late Friday that attacked the Russia investigation and the prosecutors in the case. The statement claimed that Stone “maintains his innocence and has stated that he expects to be fully exonerated by the justice system” and that the president didn’t want to interfere in those efforts.

“At this time, however, and particularly in light of the egregious facts and circumstances surrounding his unfair prosecution, arrest, and trial, the President has determined to commute his sentence,” the statement read. “Roger Stone has already suffered greatly. He was treated very unfairly, as were many others in this case. Roger Stone is now a free man!”

Trump has long disdained the Mueller investigation and claimed it has unfairly targeted him and his associates — not just Stone, but his former campaign chair Paul Manafort and former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. Trump and his attorneys dangled pardons during the Russia investigation.

With Stone, Trump has finally gone beyond complaining to explicitly intervening in one of his associates’ convictions.

Trump repeatedly signaled that he might grant clemency to Stone. It’s the most definitive example yet of his use of the power of the presidency to protect friends or advance his interests, Jim Pfiffner, a professor at George Mason University, said. “A willingness to use the pardon power to protect his friends and supporters sends a signal to others who might be willing to break the law in support of the president,” Pfiffner wrote in an email.

The controversy leading up to Stone’s commutation

Prosecutors made the case that Stone obstructed the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election by lying to the committee about his attempts to contact WikiLeaks, and by intimidating and trying to get another witness to lie for him about those efforts.

During the trial, witnesses such as Rick Gates (a Manafort associate who pleaded guilty in the Mueller probe and cooperated with prosecutors) and Steve Bannon testified that Stone claimed to the campaign that he had inside information about WikiLeaks’ access to damaging information about Hillary Clinton. Mueller’s investigation found that information was obtained through hacking by Russian military intelligence.

Prosecutors did not actually prove that Stone had any inside information during the trial. But, as Vox’s Andrew Prokop has written, prosecutors during the trial argued that “Stone’s motivation for his lies and obstruction was that ‘the truth looked bad for Donald Trump.’”

So it’s not a surprise that Trump has closely followed this case — and appeared to publicly pressure the Justice Department to lessen his sentence. In February, as Stone’s sentencing date approached, federal prosecutors recommended that Stone serve between 87 and 108 months (about seven to nine years) in prison, a range prosecutors said adhered to federal guidelines and “would accurately reflect the seriousness of his crimes and promote respect for the law.”

But not according to Trump. “This is a horrible and very unfair situation,” the president tweeted on February 11. “The real crimes were on the other side, as nothing happens to them. Cannot allow this miscarriage of justice!”

Later that same day, the Justice Department began signaling that it would intervene, with an anonymous official suggesting that was not the sentence recommendation that had been briefed to the department. Things escalated from there, as four prosecutors handling the case abruptly withdrew their involvement.

Aaron Zelinsky, who worked on Mueller’s team, filed a memo withdrawing himself from the case. Next came prosecutor Jonathan Kravis, who said he was leaving the team because he had resigned as an assistant US attorney. Two more followed: Adam Jed and Michael Marando said they would also remove themselves from the case.

The mass exodus came as the Justice Department submitted a memo in the Stone case that said its first sentencing statement did “not accurately reflect the Department of Justice’s position on what would be a reasonable sentence in this matter.”

The document said the DOJ believes “incarceration is warranted” but that 87 to 108 months isn’t appropriate and doesn’t “serve the interests of justice in the case.”

If this all gave the impression that the Justice Department had caved to pressure from Trump, and that prosecutors resigned in protest of this interference, well, Trump has done little to dispel that troubling notion.

“Congratulations to Attorney General Bill Barr for taking charge of a case that was totally out of control and perhaps should not have even been brought,” Trump tweeted. He went on to claim the “Mueller Scam” was improperly brought. That’s a wholesale mischaracterization of the inspector general’s report on the Russia investigation, which said the case was appropriately predicated. Mueller took over the Russia investigation almost a year after the FBI had opened it, and there’s no evidence the former FBI director lied to Congress.

Many months later, Zelinsky also told the House Judiciary Committee in June that political interference played a role in Stone’s sentencing. “What I heard — repeatedly — was that Roger Stone was being treated differently from any other defendant because of his relationship to the president,” he testified.

Ultimately, Judge Amy Berman Jackson sentenced him to 40 months (about three years) in prison for his conviction. It ended up falling below the sentencing guideline recommendations, but then again, that could have happened anyway — it was always up to the judge.

Now that Trump has granted Stone a commutation, the sentence doesn’t matter so much. It also puts Barr’s apparent intervention on Stone’s behalf in an even more unforgiving light — a sign that all along, this was about trying to help the president’s cronies.

A president’s use of clemency also can’t be thought of in isolation. “They have to be thought of alongside all of the other mechanisms for presidential enforcement or non-enforcement of different laws,” Bernadette Meyler, a law professor at Stanford University, told me. The commutation is the last step in a troublesome list of interventions.

Trump didn’t use a full pardon, so Stone isn’t absolved of his crimes. But he won’t face the consequences for them either. Trump’s commutation effectively rewards Stone for his deceptions, which prosecutors say were intended to protect the president. The message: Try to protect the president, and you’ll be rewarded.

Will Trump face any fallout for this?

Trump’s commutation of Stone’s sentence is, at the most basic level, constitutional. The president does have essentially unchecked power when it comes to granting clemency for federal crimes. That does not mean it’s wise. This could very well be a precarious moment in Trump’s presidency, especially as his administration faces pressure for his handling of the coronavirus and nationwide protests against police brutality.

Trump isn’t the first president to use his clemency power controversially, of course. George H.W. Bush pardoned those caught up in the Iran-Contra scandal, which implicated Bush himself. Bill Clinton’s pardon of financier Marc Rich also raised questions of influence peddling, specifically whether Clinton had rewarded a prominent donor, leading to a congressional investigation. And in 2007, George W. Bush commuted the sentence of former White House aide Scooter Libby for perjury and obstruction of justice.

But both of those examples came in the final weeks and days of the presidents’ terms in office; they were leaving the presidency for good, which dulled the political fallout. Trump took this risky move months before he’s up for reelection for a second term. At the same time, Trump didn’t fully absolve Stone, and only erased his sentence, which might have been an attempt to soften the political impact.

Either way, the only real check on Trump’s pardon power is political — whether voters reject his actions or Congress investigates and denounces it. That includes Republicans, too.

Experts told me the country’s founders very much worried that the pardon power could be abused by presidents. They saw impeachment as a possible check on this. Trump already has one impeachment under his belt, and it proved that his defenders in Congress are simply unwilling to break with him.

Trump already has a handful of controversial pardons on his list, too, including a string of pardons and commutations for former politicians and business leaders engaging in corrupt acts.

Mark Osler, a law professor at the University of St. Thomas and a former federal prosecutor, said past presidents have used their pardon powers in a principled way, even when it was unpopular, such as President Gerald Ford’s decision to grant amnesty to Vietnam draft dodgers. They can also use it to signal what they value, like President Barack Obama’s use of clemency for nonviolent drug offenders. But Trump has largely used his pardon power to forgive others who felt unfairly accused, to benefit popular right-wing figures, and to reward and benefit his friends — and Stone, a longtime and faithful associate of the president, fits right in.

“With President Trump, in the 2016 election, we all knew how much he valued loyalty,” Osler said. “And it was completely predictable how he would use clemency.”

The question with Stone’s commutation is whether Trump feels emboldened enough to lessen or wipe out the convictions of others implicated in the Mueller probe, separate from his Justice Department.

For his detractors, it will be an alarming breach of the rule of law and another norm shattered. But for Trump and his supporters, this will be yet another triumphant assault on the “Russia hoax.”

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“Everyone should wear a mask,” Blumberg said. “People who say, ‘I don’t believe masks work,’ are ignoring scientific evidence. It’s not a belief system. It’s like saying, ‘I don’t believe in gravity.’”

Updated at 2:53 p.m. on July 8.

Governor Larry Hogan directed Maryland’s Board of Elections Wednesday to hold an in-person election in November, and to provide applications for absentee ballots for every eligible voter.

Hogan is demanding that the board promote early voting and absentee voting to make the elections as safe and efficient as possible amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The decision is based on the recommendations from the three Republican members on the state board, but runs contrary to the view of Democratic board members and the state’s association of election officials.

The association wrote in a statement that applications for absentee ballots would create “voter confusion.” Democrats have pushed for providing mail-in ballots to all eligible voters without making them file an application.

In a letter to board members on Wednesday, Hogan wrote that he remained concerned about the “serious failures” of the state’s June 2 primary and the resulting “disenfranchisement and suppression of primary voters.”

In the letter, Hogan addressed the debate between Democratic and Republican lawmakers, interest groups, and others about how to hold the November election.

“This discussion should not be subject to undue partisanship or political influence,” he wrote. “Providing citizens with accessible, accountable, and transparent ways to cast their ballot is an essential component of our democratic republic and your primary responsibility.”

However, local election officials are concerned about having sufficient staff, personal protective gear, and other resources to hold in-person voting. David Garreis, president of the election officials association, wrote to state board members and officials last week expressing concern about the lack of election judges willing to work during the pandemic.

“The local boards of election are concerned it is not possible to recruit, train, and retain 25,000 election judges for the November general election,” Garreis wrote.

Hogan replied to that concern in the letter, saying, “the state will encourage state employees to supplement election staffing needs and provide necessary personal protective equipment.”

Maryland’s use of applications for mail-in ballots for the November election is the strategy the District used for its June 2 primary election. D.C.’s primary was marred by problems, including voters not receiving their ballots in the mail after applying for one.

In a reversal last month, the D.C. Board of Elections decided to send mail-in ballots to all eligible voters without making them apply and to expand in-person voting locations for the November election — essentially, taking the approach Maryland used for its June primary.

In a joint statement released on Wednesday afternoon, Senate President Bill Ferguson and House Speaker Adrienne Jones, both Democrats, wrote, “We are pleased the Governor finally made a decision that included early voting and election-day precinct level voting, but we share the concerns that local election officials will not have the staff or resources to process that many Vote By Mail applications in a timely manner. The Governor must provide the necessary resources to the local and state boards for personal protective equipment, additional staff and a robust awareness campaign.”

They added they hoped Hogan would “maintain maximum flexibility” to be able to pivot should the pandemic worsen or not enough election judges are found.

This article was updated to include a comment from Senate President Bill Ferguson and Speaker Adrienne Jones.

Virginia will join the rest of the Washington region in banning handheld cell phone use while driving starting in January.

Gov. Ralph Northam held a ceremonial bill signing this morning. The law is technically in effect now, but police won’t enforce it for six months to allow time to educate the public.

When enforcement begins in January, it’ll be a primary offense, meaning police can pull you over if they see you on your phone. The penalty is a $125 fine for the first offense and $250 for the second, or if you were caught in a construction zone.

Sen. Scott Surovell of Fairfax sponsored the bill and said anyone driving on Virginia highways “knows this problem is an epidemic.”

“This bill will save lives,” said Del. Jeff Bourne of Richmond, who sponsored the House version.

More than 400,000 people were injured in crashes involving distracted driving in 2018, according to the National Traffic Highway Safety Administration. In Virginia, distracted driving accounts for more than 1,500 crashes and 7-10 fatalities a year.

Drive Smart Virginia, a group that advocates for not texting while driving, said distraction-related crashes are often underreported, so the statics can be misleading.

“Cell phone use is harder to prove than, for instance, DUI,” said Rich Jacobs of Drive Smart. “There’s no breathalyzer for cell phone use.”

Christina Dempsey, a paramedic in Fredericksburg has advocated for the law for years. She took part in the virtual bill signing. Her sister and niece were killed by a distracted driver. Dempsey said she often sees the consequences of distracted driving in her job.

“So many of these crashes could be avoided if not for distraction,” she said. “Laws will now be able to hold people accountable for their actions.”

Distracted driving from cell phones is dangerous because it encompasses three types of distraction: visual, where drivers take their eyes off the road; manual, when drivers are typing or using their hands to adjust something; and cognitive, where drivers’ minds are on what’s happening on the phone, not on the road.

Drivers can still use voice commands like “Siri” on iPhone or “Google Assistant” on Android for navigation, choosing music and more.

Virginia legislators have long tried to strengthen its driver safety laws.

In 2007, the state banned texting while driving. Five years later, it became a primary offense instead of a secondary one. As a secondary offense, a person would have to be pulled over for some other reason to get ticketed for texting.

From 2017-2019, lawmakers got close to passing full hands-free bills but they were scuttled for various reasons. Last year, the General Assembly passed a law for hands-free cell phone use in work zones and finally the full hands-free bill passed earlier this year.

“Change is incremental,” Surovell said. “We’ve been aiming at it for 13 years.”

The District enacted its hands-free law in 2004. Maryland did so in 2010. They join 23 other states with similar laws.

In Virginia, Legislative Black Caucus members were concerned the law could lead to over-policing of Black drivers. So as part of the law, police departments will undergo implicit bias training and release statistics on demographics.

It’s unclear from relevant research if laws banning hand-held phone use or texting while driving reduces crashes. A 2009 analysis compared rates of claims for crash damage in three states and the District of Columbia before and after hand-held phone use bans went into effect. The study found no significant change in claim rates for two jurisdictions relative to other states. It also found a small, but significant, increase in claim rates in the other two jurisdictions, according to IIHS.

Meanwhile in Georgia last year, traffic fatalities and collision insurance claims have declined since a cell phone law took effect, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution report.

Janet Brooking of Drive Smart Virginia said the determination of victims’ families brought the law to fruition.

“It’s been one of the most rewarding, one of the most difficult things that I’ve had to do, because there are so many stories and there’s so much courage demonstrated in these families coming forward and being able to tell their story,” she said.

As some federal employees face pressure to return to work, U.S. senators from Maryland and Virginia are urging agency heads to continue to encourage working from home.

Returning to federal workplaces while COVID-19 cases continue to mount in many parts of the country threatens to “erase the progress made against the virus and endanger the health and safety of federal employees and everyone else in an agency’s region,” says a new letter from Democratic senators Chris Van Hollen, Ben Cardin, Mark Warner, and Tim Kaine. It was sent to acting directors at the Office of Personnel Management and the Office of Management and Budget.

The letter references April guidance from the agencies that encourages federal employers to follow their state or locality’s reopening schedule.

“Agency heads should begin transitioning federal operations to align with a geographic area’s respective phase, while also accounting for agency operational needs, as appropriate and applicable,” the guidance says. Eighty-five percent of the federal workforce is outside the Washington area.

The four Democratic senators say that guidance has resulted in some federal employees in the DC region being called back to the office while the coronavirus remains a threat. Their letter suggests following in the footsteps of local governments that have kept most of their employees at home.

“Unlike these federal agencies, governments in Maryland, Virginia, and the District continue to utilize liberal telework policies and limited office capacity for public sector workers,” the letter says.

D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, and Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam sent a similar letter in April to OPM Acting Director Michael Rigas calling for a continued federal telework policy.

There are no federal laws that require employers — in either the public or private sectors — to take certain steps to protect workers from the coronavirus. The federal government has only issued optional guidelines.

Virginia is the only U.S. state considering its own statewide health regulations for workplaces during COVID-19, but those regulations are still being refined by Virginia’s Department of Labor and Industry, and they must be approved by a board that includes employer representatives.

Nationally, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) began recalling its employees in June. In the D.C. area, some Defense Department workers have been called back, according to The Washington Post.

The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the nation’s largest union of federal employees, sent a letter to OMB in April outlining six conditions employers must meet before workers can be required to return to the office. They include universal testing for COVID-19 and requirements that symptomatic employees be sent home on leave.

The union’s president, Everett Kelly, told WAMU last month that all agencies should be required to follow the same reopening procedures.

“You’ve got some agencies not making sure that employees returning back to work are tested,” Kelly said. “Some are making sure there’s adequate PPE. Some don’t take that to mean anything. That’s a very serious problem for us.”

Air purifiers with HEPA filtration efficiently capture particles the size of (and far smaller than) the virus that causes COVID-19, so the answer is yes. Furthermore, on October 5, 2020, the CDC changed its stance on how the virus is transmitted, and now says it “can be spread by exposure to virus in small droplets and particles that can linger in the air for minutes to hours.” In short, the CDC now acknowledges that the virus can spread via the air. That’s a major adjustment of its prior position: that direct person-to-person contact, including via larger respiratory droplets that do not travel far or linger in the air, was the main vector, and that airborne (a.k.a. aerosol) transmission was not a vector, period. Evidence for airborne transmission has been mounting since the spring; to catch up on the course this research has taken, read over University of Colorado-Boulder aerosols scientist Jose-Luis Jimenez’s summary in Time. And it’s worth noting that on September 18, the CDC published—and three days later retracted, citing errors in an internal review process—a version of its guideline that stated flatly that inhalation of aerosolized respiratory droplets “is thought to be the main way the virus spreads.”

Alex Wong/Getty Images

Cut child poverty by a third, break down racial segregation, and stabilize the economy.

Joe Biden has a housing policy agenda that is ambitious, technically sound, and politically feasible, and that would — if implemented — be life-changing for millions of low-income and housing-insecure households.

According to original modeling by Columbia University scholars, it could cut child poverty by a third, narrow racial opportunity gaps, and potentially drive progress on the broader middle-class affordability crisis in the largest coastal cities as well.

The plan hasn’t stirred an intraparty debate or really much attention at all, which could make it politically feasible to enact.

“Biden’s plan is bold, comprehensive, and will go a long way in making sure every American has a home,” Mary Cunningham, the vice president for metropolitan housing and communities policy at the Urban Institute, tells me. “It’s plainly obvious, in the middle of this pandemic, that home is more important than ever.”

The centerpiece is simple. Take America’s biggest rental assistance program — Section 8 housing vouchers — and make it available to every family who qualifies. The current funding structure leaves out around 11 million people, simply because the pot allocated by Congress is too small. Then pair it with regulatory changes to help the housing market work better for more people. It’s the general consensus approach among top Democratic Party politicians and left-of-center policy wonks.

At the time when most presidential candidates were rolling out their housing plans, Biden didn’t have one, dropping his instead right before the South Carolina primary when it was swiftly overshadowed by the dramatic shift in the campaign and then the Covid-19 pandemic. But precisely because the plan has not provoked much infighting and because key provisions would be eligible for budget reconciliation treatment, which would require a majority vote in the Senate instead of a supermajority, it’s the kind of thing that really might happen in 2021 if Biden won.

Universal housing vouchers, explained

Federal housing assistance is something of a patchwork of different programs that includes the Section 8 voucher system, which arose in the mid-1970s when the Nixon and Ford administrations introduced it to incorporate market-oriented reforms into the welfare state. The way it works is that instead of the federal government spending money to build housing that is then rented at a discount to low-income people, the government gives low-income people vouchers that landlords can redeem for money and lets them rent whatever kind of house someone will rent to them. Since the voucher program, when created, became Section 8 of the US Housing Act of 1937, the vouchers have come to be known as Section 8 vouchers.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that more than 5 million people receive help from the program.

It has various flaws, including, most notably, the widespread discrimination against voucher tenants that Stephanie Wykstra has written about for Vox. Another huge flaw is that that, unlike Medicaid or SNAP — which, at least in theory, provide benefits to everyone who meets the eligibility criteria — Section 8 is capped in the amount of money available to it by the whims of Congress. As it stands, about three-quarters of eligible people don’t get the help because there simply isn’t enough money in the pot, which is a huge missed opportunity to improve the lives of millions of Americans.

CBPP data shows that receipt of housing vouchers leads to a decline in children experiencing separation from their parents, a decline in domestic violence, a decline in food insecurity, and, most of all, a steep decline in housing instability.

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

The idea of funding the program at the full level to meet family needs has existed for decades. But multiple DC-based housing policy wonks tell me it was Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book about housing instability in Milwaukee, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, that helped put it on more people’s radars.

It’s a heartbreaking book, and the epilogue speaks about vouchers in a way that stretches beyond the arcana of federal budge policy: “A universal housing voucher program would carve a middle path between the landlord’s desire to make a living and the tenant’s desire, simply, to live.”

Stephanie Collyer and Chris Wimer of Columbia University’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy helped me quantify the impact more precisely with a mathematical model. Looking at detailed data from the 2019 Annual Social and Economic Supplement to the Current Population Survey, they identified currently eligible households that are not receiving assistance. They then modeled the impact of getting assistance on household budgets. One nuance here is that the official poverty measure somewhat perversely fails to count the receipt of rental assistance as a form of income, thus saying that unassisted families are by definition no poorer than assisted families. But the census also publishes a supplemental poverty measure that corrects for this and other flaws.

They find that the properly measured poverty rate falls by 22 percent under this proposal, while child poverty falls by 34 percent. Not bad for a policy that would cost just a fraction of Trump’s tax cuts.

Moving to Opportunity

One nuance is that the underfunding of the program mitigates the landlord discrimination problem somewhat, because under the current system, if one family can’t use a voucher, that frees up money for someone else.

Will Fischer, the senior director for housing policy and research at CBPP, cautions that in the real world, “we can’t flip a switch and get a voucher to everyone who’s eligible overnight.” He says it’s a critical goal, but to achieve it takes not only money for vouchers but also investments. “At the same time we’re expanding the voucher program, we should be building our capacity to help families with vouchers rent in a wide range of neighborhoods, and we should be taking steps to increase the supply of housing, especially in the tightest markets.”

One model is a Seattle program Dylan Matthews profiled for Vox last year that involved a partnership between the city housing authority and the housing authority for the surrounding suburbs in King County. The idea was to give families a bit of extra money as well as hire navigators who would help families understand the value of relocating to “high opportunity” neighborhoods, away from concentrated poverty and blight.

Raj Chetty, an economist with the Opportunity Insights team that helped evaluate the project, called it “the largest effect I’ve ever seen in a social science intervention.”

Seattle’s initiative is a fantastic role model but will be difficult to bring to anything resembling mass scale.

“It isn’t just about increased financial subsidy,” Jenny Schuetz a housing economist with the Brookings Metropolitan Program, tells me. “It also requires high-capacity local government/nonprofit partners,” which simply don’t exist everywhere. But the federal initiative that could at least make it possible would involve expanding the use of what the Department of Housing and Urban Development calls “small-area fair market rents” — basically ensuring that subsidies can be pegged to the cost of renting a house in a nicer neighborhood, not just a pocket of concentrated poverty.

The Biden plan is a little short on these kinds of implementation details, which is the one area where experts see scope for improvement. What he does do is try to tackle the other side of America’s housing affordability problem, which is that even people who aren’t low-income increasingly struggle to find a place to live in metro areas in the Northeast and West Coast where there simply aren’t enough houses to go around.

A carrot for more housing

The basic problem is exclusionary zoning. When land is expensive and demand for housing is high, the natural market response would be to build denser structures — townhouses or mid-rise apartments or even big towers — so as to spread the land cost across more households. The origins of these zoning rules were intimately connected to now-forgotten segregation battles in the first half of the 20th century, when the Supreme Court rules essentially that cities couldn’t formally exclude Black people from certain neighborhoods but they could try to exclude all low-income people and count on economics to do the rest.

Later, redlining policies excluded Black neighborhoods from much New Deal housing assistance, depriving Black families of wealth-building opportunities and creating pockets of poverty and exclusion that persist today.

Handing out money to those in need helps the problem on one side, but breaking down the zoning barriers on the other is important as well. Biden picks up a proposal from Sen. Cory Booker and Rep. James Clyburn to require localities that benefit from Community Development Block Grants or Surface Transportation Block Grants to develop plans to change zoning rules that block development of more housing types.

While expanding vouchers is a straightforward liberal pitch, changing exclusionary zoning involves more complicated politics. Many of the most exclusionary places in America are affluent inner-ring suburbs of big coastal cities — places that these days send Democrats to Congress, but that presumably don’t want to be made to change their zoning rules. The potential good news is that, conceptually at least, liberalizing regulation is something Republicans might support.

Emily Hamilton, an urban policy scholar at the libertarian Mercatus institute, does caution that “the surface transportation part would lose a lot of free market people” because it smacks of federal coercion to some degree, but adds she thinks it’s justified “given that the federal government has done so much to encourage exclusionary zoning through transportation spending and otherwise.”

Her colleague Salim Furth adds the additional caution that “nobody should trust HUD to evaluate zoning changes” because it’s too easy to make a show of reducing exclusion while retaining its substance. He thinks incentive plans should be pegged squarely to outcomes rather than input changes, something that’s compatible with the text of the Booker/Clyburn proposal but would have to be refined at the implementation phase. But even without nailing down all the details, one shouldn’t neglect the transformative potential of Biden’s core idea, especially given the current crisis.

America is on the edge of housing crisis

As Jen Kirby details for Vox, America is on the verge of a housing crisis as emergency eviction moratoriums expire even while the Covid-19 pandemic continues to rage.

Additional extension of emergency measures would help. But fundamentally, the United States can’t really build a housing system around the assumption that landlords will allow tenants to live indefinitely without paying their rent. And from a tenant perspective, while not being evicted is much better than being evicted, a moratorium simply leaves unpaid debts to pile up and creates problems in the future.

When precarious renters need in the short term is actual financial help that would let them make rent. And what the country needs is a more robust housing safety net of the kind that would be created by turning Section 8 into a universal program. Under the status quo, capacity to help people with the rent doesn’t expand along with need. Under universal vouchers it would — household economic pain would be cushioned by automatic expansion of funding, and the economy as a whole would be stabilized by spending ramping up when needed.

To an extent, the entire housing topic has fallen by the wayside amid a very crowded news agenda. But as a tool for stabilizing a pandemic-ravaged economy and l for breaking down entrenched forms of housing segregation, it’s hard to beat an expanded and improved housing voucher program.

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Every day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that has the power to save lives. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. Vox’s work is reaching more people than ever, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles, videos, and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today.

Read 36 remaining paragraphs | Comments

MIT and Harvard are suing to have ICE's latest attack on (legal) foreign visitors to this country blocked. A few days ago, ICE retracted an exception it had previously issued in response to the COVID pandemic. This exemption was issued back in March to allow students here on visas to continue their studies, even if all of their classes were now online.

It's now July and the COVID crisis isn't over. In fact, it appears to be getting worse. The US is expressing its exceptionalism by dominating the world in the number of new cases daily. Schools are prepping for the fall semester and the reality of the situation is that moving back to normal classes, rather than sticking with remote learning, just isn't possible at this point in time.

That reality makes no difference to ICE. It has decided the crisis is over and any students here legally should exit the country if they can't take classes in person. MIT and Harvard have no intention of moving back to physical classes when school commences in a couple of months. And the schools don't feel their foreign students should be punished for not attending classes that aren't being held or putting their health at risk unnecessarily just because the administration has unilaterally declared it safe to return to school.

Here's how the schools describe the current situation in their lawsuit [PDF]:

Medical evidence and official governmental guidance indicate that indoor gatherings of any size are of particular concern. Densely populated classrooms that are attendant with on-campus instruction have the potential to turn into “super-spreader” situations that endanger the health of not only the university community, but also those in the surrounding areas and anyone else with whom community members may come into contact. Indeed, in recognition of the exceptional risk of indoor congregation, Harvard has limited undergraduate on-campus residency to 40% of capacity for the upcoming term. Similarly, MIT has limited undergraduate on-campus residency for the fall to members of the rising senior class and a limited number of additional students.

Even if it were possible to simply ignore the ramifications of bringing students back on campus to partake in "super-spreader" classes, ICE is demanding schools jump through a series of logistical hoops to ensure students here on visas can continue to be enrolled and stay in the country. The first demand is that physical classes must compose a certain percentage of the total curriculum. Then it gets even more difficult. Schools will be required to do the following for each and every foreign student enrolled.

[ICE] announced that universities that have adopted a hybrid model—a mixture of online and in-person classes—will have to certify for each student on an F1 visa that the “program is not entirely online, that the student is not taking an entirely online course load for the fall 2020 semester, and that the student is taking the minimum number of online classes required to make normal progress in their degree program.” To do so, universities on a hybrid model will be required to issue a new Form I-20 for each of these students—in some cases, numbering in the thousands per university—by August 4, 2020.

Even if ICE doesn't care about foreigners, you'd think it might have some consideration for the Americans running these schools. But it appears it doesn't. The clawback of the exemption means schools must start putting more people on campus -- including staff and administration -- even if it means increasing the risk of virus transmission. The lawsuit points out the original exemption was supposed to be in place "for the duration of the [COVID] emergency." Without prior notice or request for comment, ICE has decided the emergency is over… at least for foreign students.

This unjustified move will do an amazing amount of damage to foreign students.

The July 6 Directive will harm continuing F-1 students immensely. For many students affected by the July 6 Directive, it is infeasible or impossible to attempt to transfer to a program that offers in-person curriculum and therefore allows them to pursue their education from within the United States on F-1 visa status. These students will therefore likely be forced to leave the country. The consequences of this sudden displacement are both financial and personal. In addition to incurring substantial expenses to make international travel arrangements in the midst of a pandemic that has significantly reduced the availability of air travel, as well as losing their homes—in many instances at great cost associated with broken leases—some students will be forced to upend their young children’s lives by returning to their home countries, while others’ families will be split apart in order to comply with the July 6 Directive.

[...]

For F-1 students enrolled in a fully online program, under the July 6 Directive those students cannot lawfully remain in the United States to continue their studies. Unless this Court intervenes, these students will be required to make precipitous arrangements to return to their home countries amid a worldwide pandemic that has caused nations to close their borders and has considerably limited international travel options. They must abandon housing arrangements they have made, breach leases, pay exorbitant air fares, and risk COVID-19 infection on transoceanic flights. And if their departure is not timely, they risk detention by immigration authorities and formal removal from the country that may bar their return to the United States for ten years.

The schools are asking the court to strike down the directive. They point out the guidance violates US administrative law, which prohibits "arbitrary, capricious" agency actions. Directives that fail to consider "important aspects of the problem" are the very definition of these terms. The suit also notes that directives like these are supposed to be preceded with a "notice and comment" period, which obviously did not happen here. The plaintiffs are asking the court to permanently block the new policy and declare it unlawful. Hopefully, the court will see ICE's move for what it is: an abuse of its power to inflict misery on foreigners -- even those who are here legally.

Let us do a little deductive reasoning, shall we? Copyright law has a term length. While that term length has been extended to the point of near-bastardization, that copyright exists on a term at all leads any investigator to conclude that the makers of that law intended for copyright protections on a given work to come to an end. If distinct characters and settings are offered copyright protections, as they are, then it reasons that those, too, were intended to have those protections end after a prescribed period of time. And if Sherlock Holmes is a literary character, an assertion that cannot be doubted, then it stands to reason that the law as written intended for the copyright protections covering his character were also to end after a period of time.

Therefore, all you Watson-esque readers witnessing my astounding logic, when the Estate of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle suggested back in 2013 in a lawsuit that the clock didn't start running as to when a character would enter the public domain until that character had ceased to be developed, the Estate's assertion clearly and undoubtedly runs afoul of the intention of those that crafted copyright law, since an author could simply forever-develop a character, and have him or her never enter the public domain! It's elementary!

But not to the Conan Doyle Estate, apparently, which has sued Netflix over its forthcoming movie about Sherlock's sister, entitled Enola Holmes. In the suit itself, the estate points out in the previous court ruling that, while most of the Sherlock stories and characters are in the public domain, the remaining ten are not. Which is true! But the estate also argues that the Sherlock character is different in those last ten stories because he... wait for it... is more emotional. And, therefore, since the Sherlock character in Enola Holmes is also emotional... copyright infringement!

"After the stories that are now in the public domain, and before the Copyrighted Stories, the Great War happened," states the complaint. "In World War I Conan Doyle lost his eldest son, Arthur Alleyne Kingsley. Four months later he lost his brother, Brigadier-general Innes Doyle. When Conan Doyle came back to Holmes in the Copyrighted Stories between 1923 and 1927, it was no longer enough that the Holmes character was the most brilliant rational and analytical mind. Holmes needed to be human. The character needed to develop human connection and empathy."

And so Sherlock "became warmer," continues the complaint, setting up the question of whether the development of feelings is something that can be protected by copyright and whether the alleged depiction of Sherlock in Enola Holmes is somehow derivative.

Imagine for a moment if this argument were allowed to win the day in court. Suddenly any author who managed to develop the characters in any series of novels would get never ending copyright on those characters. Luke Skywalker is suddenly a dick in Episode 8? New copyright term on his character. Harry Potter goes through puberty and gets romantic with his best friends little sister? Well, first, come on man, but also... new copyright term on his character!

That isn't how any of this is supposed to work, of course. Again, it's quite obvious that the framers limited copyright to a term for a reason, and that reason was that works and characters that are protected by copyright are supposed to eventually end up in the public domain. Playing these games as to when a character that is otherwise in that public domain got some characteristic to end run around the term and still get copyright protection doesn't change that.

If the court has any sense, this suit should find the garbage pail with the quickness.