Lindsey

Patrons eat outdoors in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. | Chandan Khanna/AFP/Getty Images

Pew Research Center found a growing share of Americans — and most Republicans — believe the US has already been through the worst of Covid-19.

A growing number of Americans of both political parties believe the worst of the coronavirus pandemic is over, even as the number of daily new cases is rapidly increasing nationwide.

A new survey from the Pew Research Center found that 40 percent of Americans now believe the worst of Covid-19 is in the past, up from 26 percent in early April. That number includes the majority of Republicans, 61 percent of whom said the country has already suffered the worst of the pandemic.

Overall, the survey — taken June 16 to 22, featuring 4,708 American adults and a 1.8 percentage point margin of error — found a strikingly deep ideological divide between how Republicans and Democrats think about the continued threat of the virus.

Democrats were much more likely to say they’re worried they may get Covid-19 and need to be hospitalized; that they might spread the virus to other people; and that they’re uncomfortable going to salons, restaurants, sporting events, or social gatherings. For instance, the study found 65 percent of Republicans are now comfortable eating in a restaurant, compared to 28 percent of Democrats.

This divide is one that is reflected in the clear difference in public officials’ response to the coronavirus. President Donald Trump has long downplayed the threat posed by Covid-19, and has pushed states to reopen nonessential businesses. That push was — until recently — widely embraced by his allies at the state level. Some states with Republican governors, however, like Texas and Florida, have begun to scale back those reopenings amid increasing case counts.

Many Democrats, on the other hand, have argued for a more cautious reopening, with some, like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, arguing for mandating the wearing of masks in public.

Beyond partisan leanings, the study also found a racial divide in current attitudes on Covid-19, with Black and Latinx Americans more likely to fear infection than white Americans.

Sixty-three and 73 percent of Black and Latinx Americans, respectively, said they were at least somewhat concerned they would become infected and require hospitalization; 43 percent of white Americans said they had the same fear. Asymptomatic spread was also of greater concern to Black and Latinx respondents; 72 percent of Black Americans and 79 percent of Latinx Americans were found to be at least somewhat concerned about being asymptomatic carriers, compared to 56 percent of white Americans with the same concern.

These findings reflect the work of multiple other studies showing that people’s political beliefs are one of the largest indicators of how they respond to the pandemic — as well as data and analyses that show Americans of color are more likely to be infected and die of Covid-19 than white Americans.

The study also revealed that Americans are increasingly united in one thing: They’re less scared now than they were in April.

Coronavirus cases are actually surging nationwide

Americans still have a lot of cause for concern, however. After nearly two months of declining coronavirus cases across the US, cases have skyrocketed again over the last two weeks. Between June 22 and 26, the country went from having fewer than 25,000 new cases per day to more than 45,000. Friday, the US recorded its greatest one-day increase in confirmed cases, documenting 45,498 new cases, according to the New York Times.

German Lopez/Vox

States like Arizona, Florida, and Texas and others throughout the South have been among the hardest hit. Texas, one of the first states to begin reopening nonessential businesses, and Florida have already begun reversing their economic reopenings in response to the increase in cases. On Friday, when Florida saw nearly 9,000 new cases and Texas nearly 6,000, both states ordered bars shuttered.

As Vox’s German Lopez has explained, many states never actually controlled their outbreaks before reopening sectors of their economy: The public was sent back into offices, restaurants, bars, and salons nationwide as the coronavirus was still circulating in their communities, leading to rising cases.

“It’s a situation that didn’t have to be,” Jaime Slaughter-Acey, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, told Lopez, adding that states failed to “be proactive with respect to mitigating the Covid-19 pandemic and to help normalize culture to adopt practices that would stem the tide of transmissions as well as the development of Covid-19 complications.”

Not all states have begun to see a spike in new infections — many of the states hit the hardest in the beginning of the pandemic, such as New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, have been spared the increases. While this could be attributed to a number of factors, epidemiologists believe these states have avoided large new caseloads by implementing strict social distancing policies and by promoting the wearing of masks.

As Lopez reports, what’s most important, experts say, is taking reopenings slowly. Because of the way the coronavirus manifests in humans, it can take two weeks — if not longer — to see the impact of any one change in policy. Many experts recommend states be prepared to rapidly reintroduce restrictions when they see cases spike.

Lauren Meyers, a mathematical biologist at the University of Texas Austin, told Lopez: “Relax things bit by bit, and see if it’s working. If we relax a few measures, we watch the data for a few weeks; if it’s not going up, maybe we can relax a bit more.”

For now, however, the figures suggest it is not yet time to relax, and that the worst is not behind the US.

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Protesters in New York City demonstrate against child detainment in 2019. | Erik McGregor/LightRocket/Getty Images

Judge Dolly Gee found ICE has failed to adequately protect children in custody from Covid-19, ordering them to be released by July 17.

Immigrant children held in US family detention centers must be released by July 17 due to concerns about the coronavirus pandemic, a federal judge ruled Friday.

It’s the first time in the longstanding legal battle over the detention of migrant children that a court has set a deadline for their release, a situation spurred on by reports of increasingly dangerous conditions in the centers.

According to the court order, as of June 25, 11 people at a family detention center in Karnes City, Texas have tested positive for Covid-19. Results are pending from tests at another center in Dilley, Texas, where four staff members have tested positive. And other diseases spreading among children in the centers are evidence of how vulnerable they are to the virus, wrote Judge Dolly M. Gee of the US District Court for the Central District of California in her order.

“The [family residential centers] are ‘on fire’ and there is no more time for half measures,” Gee wrote.

Gee also excoriated the Trump administration for failing to abide by the most basic recommendations set by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for preventing the spread of Covid-19 in the detention centers. The order notes Dr. Paul Wise, a Stanford University professor of pediatrics and health policy who was assigned in 2019 to monitor the health standards at the facilities, found “ICE’s critical areas of improvement are in social distancing, masking, and testing—in other words, the basics.”

It was in response to this assessment that Gee ordered Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to release children to their parents or another guardian, or a Covid-free group home with their parents’ consent.

The order requires the release be done with “all deliberate speed” — and by July 17 at the latest. It applies to children who have been held in the two Texas centers and one Pennsylvania center for more than 20 days.

According to the ruling, there were 124 children in ICE custody as of June 8. The agency recently released nearly 400 other children from shelters.

ICE told Vox it is reviewing the order, adding that the 11 positive Covid-19 cases in the Karnes detention center were tested at intake and haven’t come in contact with other families in the facility. “The detainees are asymptomatic and have been medically isolated by family unit,” the agency’s spokesperson wrote in an email.

Gee’s order is not the first time the Trump administration has been confronted by the courts over its detainment of migrant children during the coronavirus pandemic, but it is the first time such a deadline has been set.

Courts have been battling the Trump administration over child detention since the virus began

Gee oversees the administration’s compliance with the 1997 “Flores settlement,” which requires that the government release children “without unnecessary delay” and to keep them in safe, clean conditions while they are detained.

In late March, as states across the country were shutting down their economies in response to the rapid spread of the virus, Gee ordered ICE to promptly release immigrant children from custody or explain why they must continue to be detained. In April, she again ordered ICE to conduct individualized release assessments for children in custody.

In an attempt to come into compliance with the Flores settlement, ICE officials then reportedly asked parents to choose between staying with their children in detention indefinitely or to allow their children to be released into the custody of family members, sponsors, or the Department of Health and Human Services.

A group of House Democrats sent a letter to the Trump administration in May, urging them to explain these reports.

“The Administration must stop using this public health crisis as a means for implementing unlawful and inhumane immigration policies. In these extraordinary times, human suffering need not be compounded by locking up families or instilling fear in the hearts of migrant parents,” the letter read.

ICE officials have said the policy was not an attempt to separate families, and was not part of a “binary choice” policy, but that it was implemented to ensure the health and safety of the children in question.

Medical experts have raised concerns since the beginning of the pandemic that migrants living in congregate detention facilities would be particularly vulnerable to Covid-19, even if the administration were to closely follow CDC guidelines. Because of these concerns, groups like the ACLU have been suing for the release of immigrants from detention centers across the country since mid-March.

From what scientists currently understand about the coronavirus, children without underlying health conditions are unlikely to die or become significantly ill from Covid-19, but they can carry the virus and expose other vulnerable populations. While there is little research on the direct impact of child separation in US immigrant detention facilities, a large body of research indicates that separation of children from their parents can contribute to post-traumatic stress disorder, learning challenges, and other traumatic social and psychological effects.

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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.

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A Black Lives Matter protester with a protective face mask demonstrates in Brussels, Belgium, on June 7 following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota. | Kenzo Tribouillard/AFP via Getty Images

Coronavirus cases are increasing, but Black Lives Matter protests may not be to blame. Here’s why.

As the Black Lives Matter protests against systemic racism and police brutality picked up in late May and early June, public health experts acknowledged there was a risk the large demonstrations could lead to a rise in coronavirus cases.

Nearly a month later, Covid-19 diagnoses are climbing, hitting an all-time high on Thursday, with the US arguably in the midst of a second wave of coronavirus cases.

But multiple analyses suggest the protests are not to blame, according to what we know so far. Initial data, reported in the Wall Street Journal and BuzzFeed, found no uptick in Covid-19 cases in cities with major protests. And a recent working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) found that there was “no significant divergence in the [Covid-19] trends after the protests” in counties with protests and those without.

“There really hasn’t been an overwhelming amount of data to say we saw spikes as a result” of protests, Saskia Popescu, an infectious disease epidemiologist, told me. “That’s a good thing.”

So what is causing the recent uptick in Covid-19 cases, which led to the US hitting its highest number of daily new cases ever this week? Experts pointed to states reopening, particularly allowing indoor gatherings — at bars, restaurants, barbershops, workplaces, and so on — in which the coronavirus is more likely to spread. Studies show that previous measures to close down such gatherings likely helped lower Covid-19 cases.

The protests themselves, however, do not seem to be a major source, at least so far. That suggests that people were able to practice their rights to free speech and assembly without contributing to the ongoing pandemic. It could even mean large gatherings outside, with proper precautions like masks and hand-washing, may be safer than we originally thought, bolstering the case for allowing people to socialize outdoors even as restrictions on large indoor settings continue.

It’s good news. But it’s not what many people, myself included, expected. I asked public health experts and epidemiologists why it might be the case.

They mentioned some important caveats. The coronavirus’s incubation period can take up to two weeks, and people coming back from protests who get sick can take a while to infect their communities, so it’s possible an increase in cases could be linked to the protests down the line. Chance also plays a major role in where outbreaks worsen, and it’s possible protesters simply got lucky in some sense.

“I’ve seen some people say that this means social distancing and these stay-at-home orders were wrong. That’s not the message you should be taking from this at all,” Popescu said. “I really think this is a great example of when you follow public health guidance and you follow harm reduction efforts in activities, you can help break that chain of transmission.”

Here are six reasons the protests may not have led to a big spike in coronavirus cases — and what we can learn from that.

1) The protests were mostly outdoors

Even before this year’s Black Lives Matter demonstrations took off in earnest, experts had already begun advising people that the outdoors seemed, in general, much safer than the cramped indoor spaces that have been the dominant source of big Covid-19 outbreaks.

The coronavirus spreads through airborne droplets and droplets that land on surfaces, which people subsequently pick up with their hands, and the outdoors mitigates these vectors of spread in several ways. First, the open air is going to make it harder for airborne droplets to reach other people. Second, it’s easier to maintain distance from others while outside compared to inside.

Third, there’s some evidence that sunny, warm, and humid weather hurts the coronavirus. Based on the early research so far, heat and UV light appear to kill the virus, while humidity might block airborne droplets from blowing from person to person. The weather isn’t enough to stop the coronavirus — as major Covid-19 outbreaks in sunny and warm Ecuador, Louisiana, Singapore, and, more recently, Arizona demonstrate — but it at least seems to help.

The research into coronavirus and the outdoors, while still very early, backs this up, Kelsey Piper explained for Vox:

One study from China (which has not yet been peer-reviewed) examined 318 outbreaks with three or more people across the country. Only one happened outdoors, and only two people got sick: Every outbreak with three or more cases happened indoors. A different study (also not peer-reviewed) in Japan found that “the odds that a primary case transmitted COVID-19 in a closed environment was 18.7 times greater compared to an open-air environment.”

Indeed, the vast majority of superspreading events were indoors. “We have yet to trace many major outbreaks back to outdoor events,” Abraar Karan, a doctor at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard, told me. “Most of what we’ve traced back … has been indoors.”

That almost all the Black Lives Matter protests were in marches and rallies outside, then, likely protected demonstrators and their peers from the coronavirus. It’s another piece of evidence supporting doing as much as you can outside over inside during this pandemic.

2) Protesters wore masks, washed their hands, and took other precautions

In talking to protesters, there seemed to be a lot of awareness about the risk of Covid-19 at demonstrations. Participants were asked to wear masks and wash their hands, and in some cases masks and hand sanitizer were given out at the protests. People were advised to take steps to avoid infecting others — to get tested, stay home if they were sick, and quarantine for 14 days after the demonstrations were over.

“People who participated in these protests, it’s not that they didn’t see this pandemic as a public health problem. They understood the risks,” Jaime Slaughter-Acey, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, told me. “At the same time, they also saw the risk of staying silent with respect to police brutality and systemic racism.”

So they tried to strike a balance: protests, but with precautions against Covid-19.

“A lot of individuals [at the protests] were very clear about the potential risk for Covid-19,” Greg Millett, an epidemiologist and vice president and director of public policy at the HIV/AIDS advocacy group amfAR, told me. “Despite the fact there wasn’t social distancing, they were still taking other precautionary measures.”

In some ways, the precautions reflect a broader shift in the US in the past few months. As the pandemic has gone on, Americans as a whole have become more likely to rigorously wash their hands, keep 6 feet from others, wear masks, and avoid going out when they’re sick. For example, polls show the great majority of Americans wear masks sometimes if not always when they go out.

There’s a growing body of evidence suggesting this has a significant effect on reducing Covid-19 transmission. With masks alone, several recent studies have found they reduce transmission. Some experts hypothesize — and early research suggests — masks played a significant role in containing Covid-19 outbreaks in several Asian countries where their use is widespread, like South Korea and Japan.

To put it another way: It seems the things recommended by this public health advice are actually effective — perhaps more effective than many experts and officials initially thought.

So maybe these kinds of protests would have led to some spread of the coronavirus a few months ago — if people didn’t wear masks, aggressively wash their hands, and try to stay apart when possible. But now those changes we’ve made may be keeping us safe from the disease, at least in the outdoor settings that the protests mostly took place in.

That, too, has implications beyond the context of protests: It means that when you do go out, you can stay relatively safe if you wear a mask, wash your hands, avoid touching your face, and keep your distance from others.

3) The protesters were relatively young

The Black Lives Matter protests were overwhelmingly led by young people, who are less likely to die or become gravely ill from the coronavirus.

It’s not necessarily that young people transmit the coronavirus at lower rates. (The science is still out on that.) It’s also not that young people aren’t susceptible to the virus — there are examples of young people getting seriously sick and dying of Covid-19, with minority communities and people with preexisting conditions hit especially hard by the virus.

But the research shows that young people, especially those without preexisting conditions, are much less likely to suffer the worst complications and die from the coronavirus. That could reduce the chance that Covid-19 cases among younger populations are counted — since young people who contracted the coronavirus but had few to no symptoms are overall less likely to get tested or hospitalized.

“If young people get infected, they’re not going to necessarily get symptomatic disease,” Gregg Gonsalves, an epidemiologist at Yale, told me. “There could have been a lot of asymptomatic or mild infections among the protesters that we’ll never hear about.”

That’s a reason for caution: If protesters were transmitting the virus to one another and didn’t know it, they could still end up having it and transmitting it to their broader communities — parents, grandparents, teachers, employers, and so on — when they get back to their non-protest lives. Those transmissions could take weeks longer to show up in the data, particularly for protesters who traveled outside their state or county to take part.

At the same time, many local and state governments and public health officials strongly encouraged protesters to get tested — even in some cases building pop-up test sites near the protests — and not many demonstrators were seemingly infected. In Massachusetts, for example, 2.5 percent of protesters’ tests came back positive, which the governor described as “reasonably consistent” with statewide numbers. So perhaps there just wasn’t that much transmission to begin with.

4) The protesters made up a small portion of the overall population

Although hundreds of thousands or millions of people taking part in a protest makes for an impressive demonstration, it’s still a small fraction of the population overall — about 6 percent of adults participated in the protests, based on a survey from the Pew Research Center. Such a relatively small population is simply less likely to cause a major outbreak.

It’s not that an individual or small group can’t cause an outbreak. There have been a few superspreading events that began with one infected individual ending up at the wrong place at the wrong time. As one example, an outbreak in Jordan that wound up infecting more than 70 people appeared to begin with one person — the bride’s father — going to an indoor wedding while he was sick.

All else held equal, though, there’s simply a lower chance of an outbreak if there are fewer segments of the population involved.

This is one reason experts believe that states reopening, not protests, has played the dominant role in the recent spike in Covid-19 cases: While the protests involved a relatively small number of people, states reopening is leading large segments of the population back out — whether due to their workplaces reopening or simply because they now have places and businesses to go back out to. That’s simply going to overwhelm protests that a fraction of the population was involved in.

“The more people that are going out in the community, and the more contacts they have, the more likely that they hit the right steps for that perfect storm,” Karan said.

5) The protests pushed other people to stay home

One surprising possibility is the Black Lives Matter protests may have led to more social distancing.

This idea comes from a study looking at US cities and counties before and after the protests. The idea goes like this: While it’s almost certain that the protests led demonstrators to reduce their social distancing, the protests may have pushed non-demonstrators back to their homes. Maybe non-protesters feared the demonstrations would become violent (as some did), assumed that businesses would be shut down and traffic would be too congested to go out due to the protests, or worried that the protests could lead to the spread of Covid-19.

Using cellphone tracking data, that’s what the study found: On net, the amount of social distancing — particularly the number of people staying home — actually increased where there were protests.

That seemed to be especially true in areas where the media reported on violence at protests, the study concluded: “We generally find increases in the percent of residents staying at home full-time and time spent at home for both sets of protests [peaceful or violent], though effects are expectedly stronger when protests are accompanied by media reports of violence.”

As a result, the study didn’t detect an increase in Covid-19 cases.

“We went in not knowing if we would find an increase in cases, a decrease in cases, or no effect,” Dhaval Dave, an author of the study, told me. “It was somewhat surprising to us.”

If anything, there may have been a decrease in Covid-19 cases due to the protests, the study found. But Dave cautioned against making too much of that finding, since it wasn’t statistically powerful.

This is where the number of protesters relative to a city’s population makes a difference. If the protests pushed even a small share of the overall non-protesting population back to their homes, that could still have a bigger impact than the protests themselves, on net.

This is just one study; maybe future research with different data or methodology could produce different findings, or more weeks of data will contradict it. The NBER study also couldn’t tease out whether Covid-19 cases increased among the demonstrators themselves.

But the study provided an important takeaway in interpreting the effects of these events. As the paper concluded, “the most visible portion of the population is not always the primary driver of the outcome of interest.”

6) There’s an element of chance

It’s an important caveat to just about any coronavirus story: There’s an element of chance that’s involved in determining whether any event leads to a lot of new coronavirus cases or few to none. So it’s entirely possible that protesters got, in a sense, lucky — and future large outdoor gatherings could still lead to superspreading events.

“Risk is probabilistic,” Gonsalves said. “It’s not absolute.”

During a pandemic, there’s always going to be a risk for a significant outbreak in any event in which people are interacting for hours. That’s going to be true until a vaccine or similar treatment is discovered.

What the protests may show is that the risk can be mitigated — with proper hygiene, mask-wearing, and other recommended steps. “If you invest in public health communication and education messaging, and you have a group of people who are willing to listen and want to be safe while engaging in something, that’s a huge piece of this,” Popescu said.

But, again, experts say even these steps can’t get the risk down to zero. So while someone may determine that a cause is worth the risk of breaking social distancing, it’s important to acknowledge that the risk is always there — and it’s a roll of the die whether the next march, rally, or other large gathering leads to the spread of Covid-19.

“I do think the protests could have had an opportunity to do that,” Millett said, referring to superspreading events. “But thankfully, because of the public health measures that many of the protesters took, we’re just not seeing that spike.”

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Axios provides a straightforward state map showing the percentage change in the 7-day average for confirmed Covid-19 cases. Numbers are up in a lot of places.

Increased testing does not explain away these numbers. Other data points make clear that we’re seeing a worsening outbreak, not simply getting better data.

So frustrating.

Tags: Axios, coronavirus, surge

Copyright 2020 Nexstar Broadcasting, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

NEW YORK (AP) — The nation's top public health agency on Thursday revamped its list of which Americans are at higher risk for severe COVID-19 illness, adding pregnant women and removing age alone as a factor.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also changed the list of underlying conditions that make someone more susceptible to suffering and death. Sickle cell disease joined the list, for example. And the threshold for risky levels of obesity was lowered.

The changes didn't include adding race as a risk factor for serious illness, despite accumulating evidence that Black people, Hispanics and Native Americans have higher rates of infection, hospitalization and death.

Agency officials said the update was prompted by medical studies published since CDC first started listing high-risk groups. They sought to publicize the information before Independence Day weekend, when many people may be tempted to go out and socialize.

“For those at higher risk, we recommend limiting contact with others as much as possible, or restricting contacts to a small number of people who are willing to take measures to reduce the risk of (you) becoming infected,” said CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield.

The same advice holds for people who live with or care for people at higher risk, Redfield added.

Previously, the CDC said those at high risk of serious illness included people aged 65 years and older; those who live in a nursing home or long-term care facility; and people with serious heart conditions, obesity, diabetes, liver disease, chronic kidney disease, chronic lung disease, and conditions that leave them with weakened immune systems.

In the changes, CDC created categories of people who are at high risk and people who might be at high risk.

Those who are at high risk include people with chronic kidney disease, chronic inflammatory lung disease, obesity, serious heart conditions, sickle cell disease, Type 2 diabetes, and weakened immune systems because of organ transplants. The threshold for obesity concern was lowered from a body mass index of 40 down to 30.

The CDC said people are at increasing risk as they get older, but it removed people 65 and older as a high risk group.

The list of people who might be at high risk includes pregnant women, smokers and those with asthma, diseases that affect blood flow to the brain, cystic fibrosis, high blood pressure, dementia, liver disease, scarred or damaged lungs, Type 1 diabetes, a rare blood disorder called thalassemia, and people who have weakened immune systems due to HIV or other reasons.

Pregnant women joined the list on the same day a CDC report found they accounted for about 9% of lab-confirmed COVID-19 cases in women of childbearing age. About 5% of women of childbearing age are pregnant at any given time.

The report showed that pregnant women had higher rates of hospitalization, of admission to a hospital intensive care unit and of winding up on a breathing machine vs. young women who weren’t pregnant. There was no clear evidence of a higher death rate among pregnant women, however.

It's not completely surprising, said Dr. Denise Jamieson, chair of obstetrics and gynecology at the Emory University School of Medicine. Pregnant women have been found to be at higher risk from other infectious respiratory diseases, likely because the lungs decrease in the volume as the uterus grows, Jamieson said.

What is surprising, she said, is that CDC didn't place pregnant women in the highest risk category.

“To me this is the most compelling evidence to date that pregnant women are at increased risk,” said Jamieson, who spent 20 years at CDC as a reproductive health expert.

Earlier this week, CDC officials called on a panel of experts to help them identify groups that should be prioritized for coronavirus vaccinations if one becomes available and supplies are limited.

Pregnant women could be among that group. So could certain racial and ethnic groups.

CDC officials shared data with the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices that showed, compared with white Americans, coronavirus hospitalization rates were 4 times higher for Hispanics, 4.5 times higher for Black people, and 5.5 higher for American Indians and Alaska Natives. A recent study in the Atlanta area suggested that being Black was as large a risk for hospitalization as having diabetes, being a smoker or being obese.

“If we fail to address racial and ethnic groups as at high risk for prioritization, whatever comes out of our group will be looked at very suspiciously and with a lot of reservation,” said Dr. Jose Romero, chair of the expert panel.

“They are groups that need to be moved to the forefront,” he said.

CDC officials say they expect to come out with recommendations for racial and ethnic minority groups soon.

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House Democrats recently unveiled their Moving Forward Act, which includes $25 billion in funding for the US Postal Service. | Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Cleaner, quieter, cheaper Postal Service vehicles — if Mitch McConnell allows them.

For months, Democrats in Congress have focused on immediate recovery from the coronavirus, saying they would turn to long-term stimulus when the time is right.

The time is apparently right. This week, House Democrats unveiled their Moving Forward Act, a $1.5 trillion infrastructure bill. It is capacious: $300 billion for repair of existing infrastructure, $100 billion for public transit, $100 billion for affordable housing infrastructure, $100 billion for broadband, $100 billion for high-poverty schools, $70 billion for upgrades to the electricity grid, and many, many smaller items.

The bill contains multitudes, but it is just an opening bid. It will eventually make its way to the Senate, where Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is certain to bargain it down and try to strip out anything he sees as “green,” if he brings it to a vote at all.

If it does come to a vote, there will be more to discuss. For now, I just want to focus on one tiny gem in the bill that has made me — and the dozens (?) of other people obsessed with this issue — very happy.

To wit: The Moving Forward Act contains money to electrify mail trucks!

Making the US Postal Service a vanguard for electric vehicles

Back in April, I wrote an in-depth post on why replacing the US Postal Service’s fleet of delivery trucks with electric vehicles is a good idea, why now is the perfect time to do it, and where the process stands within the USPS.

To summarize: USPS trucks are old and janky. They get poor gas mileage, have no air conditioning, regularly burst into flames, and are imposing huge and rising fuel and maintenance costs on the already-struggling agency. Replacing them with electric delivery trucks would radically reduce those costs, improve driver health and performance, and reduce air and noise pollution in districts across the US.

Paul Ratje/AFP via Getty Images

The USPS says it needs about $6 billion to replace its vehicles and about $25 billion overall to save itself from financial ruin. Well, if you scroll way, way down in the Moving Forward Act to Division I, Sec. 50001, you find this:

Authorizes $25 billion in funding for the Postal Service for the modernization of postal infrastructure and operations, including through capital expenditures to purchase delivery vehicles, processing equipment, and other goods. The section reserves $6 billion for the purchase of new vehicles.

Then Sec. 50002 gets more specific about how the $6 billion for vehicles must be used:

Requires the Postal Service to use any of the authorized funds to purchase electric or zero-emission vehicles to replace its current right-hand-drive vehicles to the maximum extent practicable. However, at least 75 percent of the new fleet must be such vehicles. The section would also require that the fleet of medium and heavy-duty trucks consist of at least 30 percent of electric vehicles by 2030 and that any vehicle purchased after 2040 be electric or zero-emission.

A minimum of 75 percent electric vehicles: that’s awesome. Beyond the immediate health benefits and the long-term savings for the USPS, this would be an incredible marketing coup for electric vehicles generally.

The Postal Service is the US public’s favorite government agency. It is a friendly, reliable presence in every community in the nation. If the familiar, boxy mail trucks were replaced with electric trucks, every American who interacts with a postal carrier — which is nearly every American — would have a chance to see an electric vehicle with their own eyes, in a workaday, non-political context.

It would do more to raise awareness of electric vehicles than any conceivable amount of marketing. And there’s evidence that electric vehicles, much like solar panels, are “contagious,” meaning that people who see them in their own community are more likely to buy them. The Moving Forward Act would spread EVs like a contagion across the country (a good contagion for once).

Using post offices to kickstart electric vehicle charging infrastructure

Speaking of acting as a vanguard, there is one other intriguing provision in Sec. 50002: “The section would require the Postal Service to provide at least one charging station at each publicly accessible facility it owns or leases by 2026 and ensure that it has adequate charging facilities to keep its fleet operating.”

Every analyst agrees that one of the major challenges facing electric vehicles is the lack of charging infrastructure. It creates a perpetual chicken-and-egg problem: the infrastructure doesn’t make sense without the cars; the cars don’t make sense without the infrastructure.

The research consultancy Brattle Group put out a report this week projecting that EVs in the US will grow from today’s 1.5 million to between 10 and 35 million by 2030. Part of what will enable (or constrain) that growth is charging infrastructure. Out of the $75 to $125 billion in investments in the electricity system Brattle estimates will be needed to support EV growth, about $30 to $50 billion need to go to charging infrastructure.

Brattle

Nothing would do more to increase consumer confidence in EV charging infrastructure than having an EV charger publicly available at every post office. It could finally break the chicken-and-egg stalemate: It would make EV chargers a familiar part of public infrastructure, prompting more consumers to choose EVs, prompting more investment in chargers.

Given the amount of federal spending needed to pull the US economy out of a nosedive, $25 billion for the USPS isn’t much, and $6 billion for electric postal trucks is peanuts. But it’s a smart investment that would return itself many times over in health, economic, and social benefits.

“This provision is a win all the way around,” California Rep. Jared Huffman told me. “We can slash emissions from one of the largest vehicle fleets in the world, boost clean vehicle manufacturing in this country, build out EV charging infrastructure, and help the USPS save money on wasted fuel and maintenance costs for an aging fleet.”

The provision was drawn from Huffman’s Federal Leadership in Energy Efficient Transportation (FLEET) Act, for which he has been fighting a lonely battle since 2014. He is cautiously optimistic about its chances.

“Good legislation has a tendency to die at Mitch McConnell’s hand,” he says, “but I hope he’s smart enough to see how much this will benefit the country and doesn’t leave it on the cutting room floor.”

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A “catastrophic hardware failure” within the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services led to the transfer of 54 firearms without background checks.

The data issue caused an interruption in the Maryland State Police Licensing Division’s ability to complete background investigations beginning on June 21. The system was restored Wednesday at 8:30 p.m. But the failure exposed a big vulnerability in the state’s system.

Firearms can be legally transferred to customers after a mandatory seven-day waiting period, even if the background investigation wasn’t completed. As a result, employees in the Maryland State Police Licensing Division must track down the 54 firearms transferred and the applications each customer submitted to complete the process.

“Even with employees working 24-hours-a-day to address this, the process is anticipated to take several days to complete,” Maryland State Police spokesman Gregory Shipley said in a statement to WAMU.

The Maryland DPSCS has not provided information WAMU has requested regarding the specific nature of the hardware failure or what other systems within the department were affected.

The Maryland State Police Licensing Division “encourages” firearms dealers not to transfer guns until checks have been completed, but they are legally able to release them. There were 893 applications for regulated firearms submitted to the state since the system failed last week. Of the 54 firearms that were released, “no prohibiting factors have been found” in the investigations of the individuals according to Shipley. “The individuals who received those firearms were the first ones whose background checks were conducted during the night.”

Factors that would disqualify someone from buying a gun include things like a previous felony conviction, a conviction for the misdemeanor crime of domestic violence or a current warrant for arrest.

If a registered firearm dealer transferred a gun to a customer before the system was up and running again, they were required to print the application for their records so a background check can be completed later, according to an earlier advisory.

Maryland’s gun laws are relatively strict. To purchase a handgun, customers are required to possess a handgun license. To receive the license, they must complete a firearm safety training course. Maryland requires that people who want to buy “regulated firearms,” which include handguns and what the state terms “assault weapons,” must apply to the state.

Would-be buyers must already be approved by the state licensing system before passing a final background check.

The National Shooting Sports Foundation, a gun industry trade group, recently suggested that gun dealers “ … may want to consider waiting on a definitive response from the NICS before opting to proceed with a sale on any delayed transaction,” amid reports of a surge in gun buying during the coronavirus pandemic.

Guns sales have been booming nationwide during the pandemic. The FBI says its system completed more than 29,000 background checks in March, for instance, nearly double March 2019. Background checks cannot be equated directly to gun sales, but they are often used as a proxy.

People walk through Georgetown University’s near-empty campus wearing masks. The school plans to submit its reopening guidelines to the District government for approval. | Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

Campuses plan to open with widespread testing, socially distanced classrooms, and mandated masks, but will that be enough to curb an outbreak?

As colleges across the United States slowly unveil campus reopening plans, I keep thinking of something Scott Galloway, a professor of marketing at New York University and co-host of the Pivot podcast, told New York magazine in May: “At universities, we’re having constant meetings, and we’ve all adopted this narrative of ‘This is unprecedented, and we’re in this together,’ which is Latin for ‘We’re not lowering our prices, bitches.’”

Galloway’s statement might come off as crass to those unfamiliar with the financial model of most American colleges. But there’s a stark element of truth to it: Many institutions, particularly smaller schools that are dependent on tuition to survive, are wary of the possibility of low enrollment numbers and declining revenue if online classes continue into the fall.

While some undergraduates have expressed reservations about paying full tuition for remote learning, many students (both undergraduate and graduate alike), staff, and faculty are unconvinced that reopening for the fall will be the best course of action. Universities across the country are being asked to weigh the public health of their community against their bottom line; yet, many administrators appear to be hoping — or in some cases, actively planning — for a return to a new normalcy.

In late May, the president of Notre Dame University published an opinion piece in the New York Times with the headline, “We’re reopening Notre Dame. It’s worth the risk.” To be clear, Rev. John Jenkins is not calling for a reopening without any safety measures; he argues that already, people regularly take on and impose risks “for the good of society.” With careful planning backed by scientific research, Jenkins believes that “the good of educating students and continuing vital research is very much worth the remaining risk.”

As of June 24, the Chronicle of Higher Education, which is tracking more than 1,000 campus reopening plans, reported that 63 percent of colleges will offer an in-person semester, 17 percent will operate under a hybrid model, and only 8 percent will commit to remote learning. (About 7 percent are considering a “range of scenarios,” while the other 5 percent are still waiting to decide.)

Colleges preparing to welcome students to campus have outlined preventative measures like socially distanced classrooms, increased cleaning, mandated face masks, fever checkpoints, and dormitory-turned-quarantine facilities in case of an outbreak. Most campuses are emphasizing coronavirus testing and contact tracing, and some have revised the academic calendar to have fewer breaks and end the semester by Thanksgiving.

These campus preparations are slated to cost millions of dollars for schools, most of which are struggling with reduced budgets, the Wall Street Journal reported. And as the pandemic continues to run its course, students and faculty are pushing for transparency in administrative decisions and voicing concerns about health care, fair pay, and policy enforcement as schools refine their fall plans.

“What we’re seeing is a chaotic, state-by-state patchwork of various options,” Jelena Subotic, a professor of political science at Georgia State University, told me. “Universities are really in a bind. They know that students prefer the in-person experience, but by pushing that side of the argument, it’ll be hard to maintain a lot of the safety precautions because, as a country, we’ve kind of abandoned the pursuit of mitigation.”

States like Arizona, California, Florida, and Texas are currently seeing a surge in cases — months after places like New York, New Jersey, and Illinois have peaked and witnessed a decline. Universities have to weigh those uncertainties, but statewide decisions can also be driven by political pressure.

Georgia State, which is part of the state’s system of public universities, is following policies issued by the state of Georgia. Because Georgia only recommends — and not requires — masks in public, there’s no strict mandate to wear a face covering or mask in the classroom, Subotic said. Hundreds of people have signed an online petition asking the University System of Georgia to revise its policies, but public universities may have far less flexibility, compared to their private counterparts, when it comes to complying with state policy.

Robert Kelchen, a professor of higher education, predicted in the Chronicle that a “similar game of follow-the-leader” — akin to the wave of sudden campus closures in March — will occur as the fall semester nears at both public and private schools, driven by the decisions from prestigious colleges who’ve opted to revert course and stay online due to public health concerns. But already, health experts worry that a second round of lockdowns might not be as effective.

“I know that if we are back on campus, no one will obey social distancing,” said Olivia, an incoming senior at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, who asked to be referred to by her first name out of privacy concerns. “The student body is overwhelmingly conservative and the faculty seem to be more conservative than most universities.” This leads her to believe that many of her peers might refuse to wear a mask or comply with social distancing — a worrisome reality since she has pre-existing health conditions that make her more vulnerable to the virus.

It’s likely that students, regardless of their political beliefs, aren’t going to play it safe when campuses reopen, despite colleges’ best efforts to squelch social activities. Young people in their early 20s are more likely to engage in risk-seeking behavior, and the close-knit reality of residential life encourages that.

“I know that parties would still happen, regardless of whatever measures the school takes to try and discourage them,” Olivia told me. While she wanted to spend a part of her senior year on campus, she said she’d prefer an online option if it meant reducing the virus’s spread, especially to the Lexington community that has a high population of elderly residents. Universities operate like small individual towns, and often have centralized health care systems for students and faculty.

“If there is a sizable outbreak, I don’t trust the existing health systems to adequately handle it,” Olivia said. “I’ve had the worst medical treatment of my life by far in Lexington, mainly from our health center on campus.”

Campus reopenings will likely exacerbate existing issues within a school’s infrastructure. Colleges have struggled for years to meet students’ counseling needs, and health center staff will likely be stretched thin, with increased testing and an influx of sick people if an outbreak occurs.

To reduce density and limit the number of people on campus, some universities are pursuing a hybrid model comprising in-person and online courses. Still, this balancing act could come at the expense of instructors and staff. Graduate students, adjuncts, and professors could still be expected to teach in-person, while increasing their workload by juggling on-campus and online courses. Campus janitors might have to clean more frequently and intensely, and food service workers could be tasked with modifying how they prepare meals.

“All this added labor doesn’t seem to have an added value or a better salary, when considering hazard pay,” said Guillermo Caballero, a doctoral candidate in political science at Purdue University and member of the graduate student advocacy group GROW. “If you’re asking us to increase workload, to do both in-person and online, it isn’t easy.”

Instructors’ top-of-mind concerns are related to in-person teaching: Many worry about the potential of contracting a serious case of Covid-19, and there’s a lack of clarity around who gets to be exempted. Not only that, the onus to enforce public health policies, like mask-wearing or social distancing, usually falls on the instructor.

“Right now, students can choose not to attend, but faculty and graduate students are required to teach,” Subotic said, adding that budget cuts have significantly reduced Georgia State’s adjunct workforce. “For us to be exempt, we have to show our human resources department that we’re high risk. But even if I live with somebody at home who is high risk, that doesn’t constitute an exemption.”

Some colleges appear to be pushing instructors to take a leave of absence if they’re uncomfortable with returning to campus, and the ability to teach remotely varies by institution. Jason Helms, an associate professor of English at Texas Christian University, recently went viral on Twitter after posting about how his request to teach remotely was denied. Helms, a tenured professor, has a young daughter with a heart condition at home, and thought he would be able to work remotely under the American with Disabilities Act. (The school suggested he take a leave of absence under the Family Medical Leave Act.) After significant pushback from faculty, however, the university announced on June 25 that all instructors, including contingent faculty and graduate students, will have the option to teach online.

A university’s workforce doesn’t solely consist of tenured professors, whose jobs are more secure. Adjuncts and graduate students tend to be more financially vulnerable, and work with significantly less labor protections. Boston University recently sent out an email to doctoral students (who have teaching responsibilities) informing them that, while on leave of absence, the university won’t cover medical insurance or provide stipend support, even if they can take classes remotely.

Caroline Bayne, a doctoral candidate at the University of Minnesota in Twin Cities, said the in-person teaching precautions appeared to be “designed by people who haven’t spent much time in a classroom.” The university is requiring students to physically distance, increase cleaning, mandate mask wearing, and possibly extending hours of class operations into the weekend to decrease capacity.

Bayne, who teaches in the department of communication studies, told me that young, non-tenured instructors already work hard to maintain authority and space in the class, on top of teaching about subjects like race, gender, and sexuality that can open them to critique from students. Plus, some classrooms are small and difficult to move around in.

“We aren’t trained in dealing with crises in the classroom,” she said. “It seems incredibly unrealistic to suggest these Covid-19-related precautions are feasible solutions when our classrooms are already deficient in so many ways irrespective of the virus.”

At Purdue University, graduate students in the advocacy group GROW say that while the college’s “soft opening” is slated to start in July, they feel unprepared and unconfident in the plans set forth. According to a survey by Purdue’s faculty-led University Senate, more than half of faculty, staff, and graduate students said they feel unsafe returning to campus by August for the fall.

“We don’t have a clear picture of what it will look like, or even how unique courses, like labs or fieldwork, will be like in terms of safety measures,” said David Savage, a doctoral student in the department of forestry and natural resources. “The university is saying a lot of words, but not conveying a lot of information.”

Universities are also not insulated from the local communities they’re a part of. Depending on the size of the school, a campus can occupy a significant part of the landscape, and residents and businesses of these towns and cities are accustomed to the wave of students that come and go every year. This fall, however, their arrival carries new risk, with the possibility of an overburdened health care system in case of an outbreak.

In Cornell University’s detailed 97-page reopening report, the school acknowledged that it is “inevitable” returning students, faculty, or staff will be carrying the virus. “Our overall goal is to implement approaches to campus re-activation that will mitigate the burden of infection and severity of disease, while minimizing disruption to normal campus life to the greatest extent possible,” the report concluded.

Many campuses like Cornell are counting on these mitigation strategies to reduce harm. Harm, then, appears to be a trade-off in the pursuit of reopening. The coronavirus has already shown that it disproportionately takes the lives of Black Americans and impacts low-income neighborhoods. It’s not exactly clear whether the sentiment of “We’re all in this together,” as Galloway mentioned in his New York magazine interview, applies — to surrounding communities, instructors, or even students, especially if most plans fail to address worst-case scenarios.

“It’s concerning,” said Savage, the Purdue doctoral student. “There’s no consideration of what a failure state would look like in the fall.”

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Update, June 26: The story is updated to reflect Texas Christian University’s teaching policy, which allows all instructors, including contingent faculty and graduate students, to choose whether they can teach online.

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Even if you find financial news incredibly boring, you will be familiar with investment firm Goldman Sachs. The famed investment bank has a list of purported controversies that rivals some small nations, which will become important in a bit. First, let's focus on this bit of hot news: Goldman Sachs developed its own font!

Goldman Sachs has released its own eponymous font, Goldman Sans, a contemporary sans-serif that garnishes merciless formality with a charming typographic "wink" here and there.

If you want to see what the font looks like, you can see it here. It's... certainly a font? To be honest, it looks clean and fine, but not especially unique. Unlike, say, the license it issues for the use of the font, which it is also giving away for free. Because, in addition to that license stating that Goldman Sachs can rescind the license at its whim -- turning anything created using it into a potential retroactive legal liability -- the license also states that you cannot use Goldman Sans to criticize Goldman Sachs, which is Goldman stupid.

(C)(2)(d) The User may not use the Licensed Font Software to disparage or suggest any affiliation with or endorsement by Goldman Sachs.

(E)(2) Further, Goldman Sachs may terminate this License, without notice to the User, for any reason or no reason at all and at any time, completely at Goldman Sachs’s sole discretion.

For a company that has so many controversies listed on its Wikipedia page, it sure is thin-skinned. And given that thin-skinnedness and the fact that the license allows the company to basically make any content created with it infringement at its whim... why in the absolute hell would anyone ever create anything with this font? Like, at all?

Other than the myriad of comments in the source article and elsewhere in which folks immediately started using the font to criticize Goldman Sachs, I mean.

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We've long noted how Bill Barr, a former Verizon lawyer (and forefather of our domestic surveillance apparatus) isn't a big fan of this whole "rule of law" thing. It had already been established that he'd been wielding the DOJ's antitrust authority as a personal Trump bludgeon, using it to launch capricious, unnecessary probes (the whole short-lived and nonsensical inquiry into California automaker emissions), and prop up the interests of companies willing to kiss Trump's ass voraciously enough (the decision to rubber stamp the Sprint/T-Mobile merger while ignoring all objective data).

But in testimony this week before Congress, longtime agency employee turned whistleblower John Elias made it very clear that it's all dumber and worse than we had previously known. The cornerstone of his testimony (pdf) involved noting that Bill Barr and DOJ antitrust boss Makan Delrahim routinely ignored staff advice and waged all manner of vindictive, facts-optional, politically motivated assaults on industry under the auspices of "antitrust."

Barr's biggest target appears to be the legal marijuana industry, investigations into which consumed upwards of 29% of agency resources. In many instances, he notes, Barr's DOJ launched inquiries into marijuana companies and smaller mergers that in no way posed competitive or monopolistic threats. In many instances, the merging companies didn't even compete with one another. Yet the inquiries pulled agency resources from investigations into, you know, actual monopolies:

"At one point, cannabis investigations accounted for five of the eight active merger investigations in the office that is responsible for the transportation, energy, and agriculture sectors of the American economy. The investigations were so numerous that staff from other offices were pulled in to assist, including from the telecommunications, technology, and media offices.

Reminder: most objective experts noted that the T-Mobile Sprint merger was a terrible idea, inevitably resulting in less competition, higher prices, and layoffs. The DOJ not only ignored its own staff's advise to block the deal, Delrahim personally helped usher the deal to completion via his personal email and text messaging accounts. Every last shred of objective data showing the deal was a bad idea was ignored. What wasn't ignored? Small legal weed companies that were targeted simply because King Dingus (and likely evangelicals, and the pharmaceutical and alcohol lobby) don't much like legalized marijuana.

In his testimony, Elias makes it clear that Delrahim's staff are frequently and fully aware that these inquiries are baseless bullshit:

"The head of the Antitrust Division, Assistant Attorney General Delrahim, responded to internal concerns about these investigations at an all-staff meeting on September 17, 2019. There, he acknowledged that the investigations were motivated by the fact that the cannabis industry is unpopular “on the fifth floor,” a reference to Attorney General Barr’s offices in the DOJ headquarters building. Personal dislike of the industry is not a proper basis upon which to ground an antitrust investigation.

You don't say. Elias, throughout his testimony, also very politely makes it clear that the DOJ's antitrust responsibilities have been hijacked to cater to the daily Trump brain fart du jour, perfectly represented by the dumb and now defunct California emissions effort:

"When news of the investigation became public and spread within the Antitrust Division, many of my colleagues, who are familiar with the “state action” defense as well as the NoerrPennington doctrine, questioned why the Division was investigating conduct that appeared to be prompted by a state regulator. In response to criticism of the investigation, on September 11, AAG Delrahim circulated an all-Division email in which he stated that he “strongly believe[s] that the Division has a basis to investigate and that the standards for opening a preliminary investigation were more than satisfied based on the available facts.” AAG Delrahim simultaneously announced an all-staff town hall meeting for September 17. There, he stated that staff was not rushed into initiating the investigation. That representation conflicted with the recollection of a staff member who had assisted with the opening memorandum."

Keep in mind, this is the same Barr DOJ many journalists and "experts" somehow believe will not only conduct a fair inquiry into giants like Google, but will deliver valid, good faith remedies for the very real problems Google helped create (as opposed to say problematic remedies focused on aiding aspiring Google ad competitors like AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon).

Like so many policy subjects (the environment, encryption, an open internet, police brutality, on and on and on...) Trump arrived at the worst possible time for a litany of reform efforts. That's doubly so for the government's antitrust authority, which has been steadily eroded for years and is in dire need of meaningful reform in the Amazon era. Instead we get... whatever the fuck this is supposed to be.

Trump will not follow New Jersey coronavirus quarantine order, ‘he’s not a civilian,’ White House says

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In crime shows, they often have this amazing tool that turns a low-resolution, pixelated image of a person’s face to a high-resolution, highly accurate picture of the perp. Face Depixelizer is a step towards that with machine learning — except it seems to assume that everyone looks the same.

There might still be some limitations.

Tags: bias, face, pixels

For years leading up to the passage of FOSTA, we were told that Congress had to pass the law as quickly as possible because so many women were "at risk" due to trafficking. And when asked for evidence of this, people would point to Backpage, even though the site had shut down its "adult" section under pressure from Congress a year earlier. Of course, the actual stats that were provided turned out to be fake and Backpage was seized before the law was even passed. The charges against the founders did not include sex trafficking charges. Also, as the details have come out about Backpage, it's become evident that rather than facilitating sex trafficking, the company was actively working with law enforcement to find and arrest sex traffickers. However, where they started to push back on law enforcement was when law enforcement wanted to go after non-trafficked sex workers.

However, with all of the moral panic around the need to pass FOSTA, we highlighted earlier this year that two years had gone by and the DOJ had not used the law a single time to go after any "sex trafficking" site. Instead, as we predicted, the law was being used in nuisance lawsuits, such as mailing list provider MailChimp and CRM provider Salesforce because Backpage had used those services.

Finally, last week, however, the DOJ made use of FOSTA in shutting down a website and arresting its operator. A site called CityXGuide.com (and some other sites that it ran -- including one with a name similar to Backpage) were seized, and the guy who ran it, Wilhan Martono, was arrested in California. From the details provided, it does look like Martono saw an opportunity to jump into the market vacated by Backpage, and the charges claim that he brought in $21 million doing so.

The original indictment was done in early June, but it was only just unsealed with Martono's arrest and the seizure of the various websites. It does seem clear that Martono sought to be the source for advertising sex work, but the DOJ conveniently mashes together sex work and sex trafficking, because that's the kind of thing law enforcement likes to do.

Indeed, the immediate reaction to this appears to be that plenty of non-trafficked sex workers, who previously had relied on Backpage to remain safe and now relied on Martono's sites, are again put in danger. The Hacking/Hustling collective -- a group of sex workers who came together to advocate around issues such as FOSTA -- put out a press release calling out what a stupid, counterproductive move this is:

“When we are re-envisioning public safety, this is a perfect example of why we can’t exempt human trafficking. Instead of resources going to real investigations or victim support, you have six agencies spending time and resources reading ads and looking for the word ‘blow job’” said Lorelei Lee, a collective member of Hacking//Hustling.

I was going to link to another website that has a blog advocating for sex workers' rights that explained in great detail how this puts sex workers at danger, but honestly, under a broad interpretation of FOSTA, linking to that website might violate the law. That's because after reading the blog post, I saw that there was a link to a "find escorts" site associated with the blog, and while I think I should be able to link to such a blog post, with its cogent explanation for why this DOJ action puts women at risk... merely linking to it would put me at risk under a broad reading of FOSTA (a stupid, unconstitutional reading, but, alas, these are some of the chilling effects created by the law).

Either way, it's difficult to see how this does anything to stop actual sex trafficking. Indeed, again, it's likely to put victims at even greater risk -- while also putting sex workers at greater risk. Studies have shown that when these sites go down, more women are put at risk. Even worse, as noted, Backpage actually helped law enforcement track down and arrest traffickers. But by making everything else such sites do illegal, it appears that (obviously) Martono avoided helping law enforcement at all (the indictment suggests he ignored various subpoenas).

Again, this is exactly as tons of people predicted. When these ads were appearing on places like Craigslist and Backpage, those companies worked closely with law enforcement to go after actual traffickers, and get them arrested. But now, with things like FOSTA, rather than do that, law enforcement can just... take down the best source to find and track down traffickers, pushing them to sites that are less and less likely to help law enforcement? How does that make sense. Indeed, we've covered a number of law enforcement officials saying that the shutdown of Backpage has made it more difficult to find actual traffickers.

And, if you want any more evidence of that: note that nowhere with this announcement is there anything about arresting any actual traffickers. I have a request in to the DOJ asking if they or any law enforcement have arrested any actual traffickers who used these sites -- but at the time of publishing they have not responded. The indictment claims -- somewhat salaciously -- that the sites seized were used to identify "numerous victims of child sex trafficking," including a "13-year-old Jane Doe." Obviously, it's horrific to find out about that Jane Doe or any victim of sex trafficking, but it does seem odd that there is no mention of any arrests of the traffickers.

Because... wouldn't arresting actual traffickers be the goal here?

Either way, this story is getting buzz on Twitter from two communities: sex workers who are pissed off and angry that they're now losing business and the ability to operate safely... and... believers in the ridiculous Q anon nonsense conspiracy theory, who believe that everything going on in the world is a plot to cover up child sex trafficking. To them, this is evidence that the big promised crackdown on sex trafficking rings has begun. Of course, the lack of any actual arrests for actual sex trafficking kinda suggests that's not the goal here.

Still, this whole thing allowed FOSTA co-author Senator Rob Portman to take a victory lap. Someone should ask him why he's celebrating putting women at risk -- or at least ask him where the arrests are for actual sex trafficking.

by J. David McSwane

Lucas Rensko was making money through a popular handyman-for-hire app called TaskRabbit, doing odd jobs and delivering groceries, when he picked up a task that led him to a leaky-roofed warehouse on a tattered road in northwest San Antonio.

Inside, a man named Jaime Rivera had set up long tables where five or six other “Taskers” earning about $20 an hour were ripping Chinese masks out of plastic bags and stuffing them into new ones that were identical but for one potentially deadly difference. The old packages were labeled in all caps “MEDICAL USE PROHIBITED,” meaning not to be used by doctors and nurses who need the strongest protection from tiny particles carrying the novel coronavirus. The new bags, intended to make their way to Texas hospitals, simply omitted that warning.

This seemingly small deception highlights a huge problem for medical workers whose best defense against a virus that ravages the body with horrifying complexity is a simple, but trustworthy, mask. That trust has eroded as Chinese-made masks claiming, sometimes falsely, to be 95% effective at filtering virus-laden particles made their way into hospitals and now local convenience stores. You might have bought them: KN95s.

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Texas officials have tried to block ineffective masks from making their way to hospitals with screenings and by rejecting anything labeled as non-medical, yet at the same time, the mysterious brokers sourcing millions of masks were working hard to evade those safeguards. The operation Rensko witnessed had the potential to push faulty masks into the Texas supply chain just as Gov. Greg Abbott eased lockdown restrictions and COVID-19 infections began to soar.

“He kind of takes us on this tour of his facility, which is essentially a shelled out warehouse,” Rensko, 36, told me over the phone, detailing how Rivera described the work at the warehouse. “He was saying they were designated for personal or residential use, not for medical. And so what he was doing was basically putting them into other packaging where the city of San Antonio and the state of Texas are able to look at them and then sell them for medical purposes.”

Rensko knew something wasn’t quite right and walked away from the TaskRabbit gig. He told his wife, who told a friend, who told another friend, who told me.

Over weeks of reporting, I’d learn that Rensko had scratched the surface of a larger scheme involving a Silicon Valley investor named Brennan Mulligan to sell what Texas health officials later flagged as “fraudulent” masks to the agency directing protective equipment to hospitals. Mulligan had enlisted Rivera, who was desperate for money after the pandemic had sapped his primary source of income, building furniture and manual labor via TaskRabbit. As countless others have, the two had a chance to make money off of the country’s public health nightmare.

When I caught up with Mulligan, he emphasized that he didn’t break any U.S. laws in his mask business. Rivera would acknowledge it was a gray area that had caught the attention of federal investigators. Both would defend their actions as simply cutting through onerous red tape put up by the Chinese and U.S. governments to get masks to those desperate for them.

The absurdity, greed and incompetence surrounding the distribution of coronavirus-era masks has taken me to Chicago, California and, now, Texas. The federal government’s efforts to get protective equipment out quickly to essential workers had failed spectacularly, and the supply chain that normally moves products from producers to vendors to end users had almost completely broken down. Counterfeit masks were flooding the market, and prices for even unreliable masks had skyrocketed.

I did what due diligence I could from my Washington, D.C., apartment before buying a plane ticket. I researched Rivera and saw on Facebook that he was a father of six who danced in his driveway and camped on the beach with the kids.

But his Facebook page also told part of the supply-chain story. Rivera had posted several photos in late April of beaten up boxes bursting at the seams with masks labeled as KN95s, similar to the American-made N95 masks produced by 3M and other manufacturers. But the Chinese masks often don’t pass muster with U.S. regulators, who screen for effectiveness in blocking small particles and certify masks that meet their standards.

The masks Rivera posted photos of were face masks with earloops that don’t fit securely around the head, as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration recommends. While the earloop-masks might offer some protection, the FDA warns that they’re not effective enough to be used in a medical setting.

The 6-foot stack of boxes were labeled as coming from a Chinese manufacturer, Guangzhou Aiyinmei Co. Ltd., which had been identified by the FDA as one of the companies producing ineffective KN95s. The masks filter as little as 39% of particles, according to testing by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They’re so ineffective that Canada issued a recall. The FDA had hastily approved them and others for health care use at the beginning of the pandemic, but it changed its mind last month, even as millions of the masks circulated in the U.S.

Rivera also posted an intriguing screenshot of a $2,000 payment he had received via Venmo, the person-to-person payment app, from a sender with the initials BM.

The payment memo read: “4/17 kn95 37.5 drop off and 50k hand-off …”

“A day’s work!” Rivera boasted about April 17, the day he used a U-Haul rental truck to deliver nearly 100,000 masks to two buyers.

Beneath his Facebook post, a friend commented, “Looks like code for a drug deal.”

Back when I had friends and could go places, I used Venmo to split restaurant and bar tabs, sometimes offering cheeky comments that I mark as private so random people can’t see. But Rivera left all of his transactions and comments public, allowing anyone to see them on a smartphone. Venmo showed that Rivera’s payments from Mulligan, aka BM, included one for “131 boxes to TDEM,” an acronym for the Texas Division of Emergency Management, the state’s version of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. TDEM supplies lifesaving gear to hospitals coping with COVID-19 cases.

Mulligan, the investor, also left his payments public. They showed that he and Rivera had paid several other people for services including deliveries of masks and “repackaging.”

Mulligan turned up in an internet scrub as a successful San Francisco businessman. He founded a company whose proprietary software allowed brands like Reebok and Nike to customize products, then sold that enterprise. He is now the CEO of SKYOU Inc., a “manufacture on demand” business whose online 3D design software allows companies to create unique shirts and hoodies and have them shipped from China.

At first, it seemed odd that a tech entrepreneur would wade into mask trading, but it jibed with my previous reporting, which found that behind every mask sale, there’s a mystery investor.

After the mask supply crisis first surfaced, federal agencies and states went into business with nearly anyone who said they could deliver protective equipment. Masks were the first priority. Here and abroad, textile factories switched to stitching masks. Hundreds of new companies popped up and won government contracts, including some with shady records. My reporting found a high-end juicer salesman, a former state attorney general and dozens in the marijuana business who had become mask brokers.

Thus was born an unregulated market fueled by unprecedented scarcity and unending demand.

The Lone Star State

I met Rensko at a Starbucks around the corner from the warehouse where the mask operation went down. It was only 96 degrees, but it felt hotter, that first day Texans know that the weak spring is turning to summer scorch.

He said Rivera had called him the day after he walked away from the TaskRabbit gig. Rivera “apologized, so he knew something was up.”

Sweaty and caffeinated, we hopped into a Dodge minivan and whipped around the corner to the warehouse. Rivera wasn’t there, but two men stood outside talking — one peeking out of a blue taxi, the other gesturing emphatically with a bottle of cologne in one hand.

They told me they knew Rivera and had watched his mask repackaging operation come and go.

“They just disappeared,” said the man with the cologne, who wouldn’t provide his name. He said he had seen the mask operation in the warehouse next door for about two weeks, with U-Haul trucks coming in and out. The operators didn’t want him to come inside, he said.

The man said he met Mulligan and tried to set him up with a private buyer he knew, a guy named Sam. He wouldn’t give Sam’s last name, but I asked him to pass along my business card.

Lamenting the heat, the man spritzed the neckline of his blue Burberry shirt with the cologne he’d been holding, “Obsession For Men.”

“It’s because I’m sweaty,” he quipped, pointing next to his hands. “Look, it works as hand sanitizer, too.”

“We’re Taking Off Anything That Says ‘Non-medical’”

Rivera took my calls and originally agreed to meet in person, but he cut off communication as I asked more questions. In our first encounter, he said he met Mulligan innocuously on TaskRabbit in April and the two forged a business relationship.

After a few successful mask deliveries, Brennan and Rivera cut out the digital middleman and went into business directly, using Venmo as their money exchange.

“So I went from picking up packages in San Antonio to Houston to Dallas to Austin, bringing them back over for processing and that’s pretty much it,” he explained. By early May, Rivera said he was in charge of hiring workers and monitoring their hours.

Mulligan shipped boxes on a Southwest cargo jet for Rivera to pick up. Rivera shared some receipts: 94 boxes and 2,444 pounds of masks came in from Los Angeles on April 29, an additional 52 boxes and 1,300 pounds on May 4. Mulligan ships a few different brands, none of which were approved by the FDA for medical use, according to pictures Rivera shared.

Rivera described the repackaging operation as common sense. “All we’re doing is we’re just omitting,” he said. “We’re taking off anything that says ‘non-medical.’”

He blamed China for the confusion. Mulligan told him that China was requiring that some mask batches be labeled non-medical, while other batches of the very same mask cleared export inspections without the disclaimer. Rivera said his workers were just clearing up the mess so states like Texas could buy masks without worry.

Without repackaging, state inspectors would simply see the warning and reject the shipment, he said.

“Before it gets to the hospital level it has to get past the red tape,” he said.

Rivera said he delivered more than a million SKYOU masks to Texas’ emergency agency. Receipts Rivera shared also showed he was delivering to private companies that resell KN95s.

Rivera spoke of his work as a noble pursuit, that he was helping to deliver lifesaving gear to the front lines despite the federal government. The reason he was traversing Texas to meet cargo jets was because Mulligan had the shipments coming from different routes each time, through Minneapolis and Atlanta to Dallas or Houston for example, to evade FEMA, which was seizing masks to stop counterfeits and to shore up the national stockpile.

“These masks are being taken and are being denied for arbitrary reasons,” he said. “Those are lives that are being impacted.”

By mid-May the repackaging had stopped, Rivera said, in part because the warehouse was too small and “there were leaks everywhere.”

Rivera couldn’t explain why anyone needed to repackage masks if it weren’t to hide the medical use disclaimer. There seemed to be nothing stopping SKYOU from selling the masks to general consumers for non-medical uses, just the same as the patterned or branded cloth masks that are becoming a fashion statement.

It wasn’t until our fourth and final phone call that Rivera mentioned he and Mulligan had been contacted by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

“His analogy was you’re telling somebody you have a Ferrari but you’re selling a Honda,” Rivera said of his face-to-face chat with an investigator.

The investigator’s visit had led him to wonder if repackaging masks for sale to unsuspecting customers was not kosher.

That’s when I asked, “Are you worried you were complicit in a crime?”

“The more we talk about it, yes,” he said.

Before he hung up and cut off communication, he added: “I’m not the brains of the operation, and I’m definitely not the wallet for it.”

Whiplash in the Mask Market

When I first contacted the Texas emergency agency, it said it hadn’t purchased any masks from either SKYOU or Mulligan. But when I sent over photos of KN95s that Rivera had shared with me and posted on Facebook, the agency recognized them.

A purchase order number on those beaten up boxes tracked to a different company, Eminent Commercial LLC, which landed a deal in mid-April to hunt down KN95s for as much as $6 a piece, more than six times what they cost before the pandemic. Eminent was essentially a master contractor, working with about a dozen subcontractors, including SKYOU, to ship in masks quickly.

TDEM canceled its deal with Eminent and its cadre of subcontractors May 20 “because the products we were receiving were fraudulent,” spokesman Seth Christensen said.

Christensen said TDEM weeds out bad masks during inspections at its San Antonio warehouse. It tests the filtration rate of sample masks from each shipment, a scientific safeguard many government agencies and hospitals lack.

Vendors with subpar products are turned away, he said, and don’t get paid. Anything labeled as non-medical use is instantly rejected, he said.

Brokers I talked with for this story described TDEM’s vetting process as far more rigorous than some federal agencies and many other states, raising concerns that faulty masks might be flowing freely elsewhere.

The agency shared a photo of a packaged mask SKYOU attempted to sell, which is identical to a photo Rivera shared, only with the medical disclaimer removed. The brand, Wentianchang, was never on the FDA’s list of masks approved for emergency use, according to the agency’s database.

Ted Coleman, Eminent’s owner, confirmed that Mulligan’s company had repeatedly tried to sell masks that didn’t pass the TDEM test. But SKYOU wasn’t alone.

“We have had millions and millions of masks that were rejected by the state of Texas,” Coleman said. “Probably a total of 10 to 15 different vendors that were just sending us anything that they could send us in hopes of getting it accepted through TDEM.”

Coleman said he tried to be “the interceptor,” making sure only masks that would pass testing got through. But he said Mulligan and Rivera went “above and beyond” to work around him and bring ineffective masks to the warehouse under Eminent’s deal.

Eminent was paid about $14.8 million for masks that TDEM accepted, according to Texas purchasing data, before the agency stopped ordering from the company. Coleman blames Mulligan for losing Texas’ business.

He said Mulligan caused “a very large scene” with officials at the agency’s Austin headquarters after SKYOU masks were rejected.

Mulligan did not return calls, but in a few brief emails he expressed the same frustration I had heard from numerous importers, brokers and government agencies: The FDA inadvertently created a glut of subpar Chinese masks, which investors can’t sell and most governments can’t buy, by first permitting use of some Chinese masks, then reversing itself.

Meanwhile, Chinese officials required that some masks have disclaimers that they’re not for medical use — an attempt, brokers say, to avoid liability if bad masks allowed wearers to become sick.

Mulligan said companies like his got caught in limbo. Masks that Texas had accepted in April were suddenly rejected by May. Repackaging, he said, was the “only solution,” and he had been told other vendors were doing the same. He did not believe that the company broke U.S. laws, but that it probably broke Chinese customs law.

By the time Mulligan got all the masks repackaged, TDEM was no longer interested in buying from him.

While many of the masks that lost the FDA’s initial approval were purchased, including by the federal government, mask importers and brokers tell me millions more are collecting dust in storage.

As Mulligan would, investors with ineffective mask stockpiles are likely trying to find other ways to unload their product, potentially getting them to hospitals.

A Techie, an Embroiderer and a Tasker Walk Into an IHOP

I had to go to Houston to look into a guy who got a $10 million contract to supply COVID-19 testing tubes to FEMA and was instead delivering unusable tiny soda bottles. But before I left San Antonio, I wanted to follow up on what Mulligan’s warehouse neighbor, the guy with the cologne, said about another potential buyer: a guy named Sam.

Mulligan’s neighbor had alluded that Sam wasn’t far away, so I went to the warehouse and typed “Sam” into Google Maps and eventually came upon Samy’s Embroidery Club, just 8 miles away. It was worth checking out, since so many people in this trade seem to be either connected to apparel and textiles or the marijuana industry.

When I entered the shop, it was alive with the thrum of industrial sewing machines that stitched together baseball team jerseys, biker gang hats and, lately, face masks.

When I mentioned Mulligan, Sam, whose true name is Bassam Hasan, said through the noise that he had a strong vibe that something was off.

“The guy, you could tell from the first minute he was hiding something,” Hasan said.

Hasan said he had become a modest personal protective equipment supplier for the city of San Antonio and the local jail, and he was trying to find medical-grade masks to potentially sell to a hospital system in Illinois. His cousin, the guy with the cologne, hooked him up with Mulligan.

“If they are 100% approved, I said why not,” he said.

According to text messages Hasan showed me, Mulligan offered a couple different brands of mask. “... they were on the CDC [Emergency Use Authorization] list before,” one text from Mulligan’s number reads. “They’ve since been removed so we can’t say whether they will meet the KN95 standard.”

Mulligan “wanted to do the deal immediately,” Hasan said. “This was like a million dollars, and I said you can’t do that.”

Instead, on Memorial Day, Hasan met Mulligan and Rivera at an IHOP a couple blocks from the mask warehouse.

“When he told me he was repackaging them, I was out,” Hasan said. “I’m not a little kid. I’ve been in business for 27 years. C’mon, man. This guy — I can tell you he’s not doing it right.”

Hasan said he left the IHOP and stopped responding to Mulligan’s calls and texts.

In the end, Mulligan told me all the effort and expense of repackaging the masks was a waste. He shared photos of scores of boxes outside a self-storage locker, millions of masks he says he’s stuck with. He has since made his Venmo transactions private.

“We did not sell ANY repackaged KN95s to TDEM or any other customers in the U.S.,” he said.

If true, then the only people who made money on the repackaging shenanigans were Rivera and other Taskers he paid over a couple weeks.

Mulligan said SKYOU continues to sell hand sanitizer and fabric masks, but he’s given up on selling KN95s because they’re “not worth the headaches.”

A spokesperson with Homeland Security Investigations, HSI, responded to my inquiry about SKYOU and Rivera’s operation with a comment that left more questions than answers.

“At this time, HSI, along with its law enforcement partners, is assessing these allegations in an effort to determine if any violations exist and/or if mishandling occurred,” the statement said.

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