Amazon has workers who tested positive for COVID-19 across 10 warehouses worldwide

Isobel Asher Hamilton 3/25/2020

Packaged merchandise on a conveyer belt is labeled for shipping at the Amazon fulfillment center in Robbinsville, New Jersey, U.S., November 26, 2018. Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

Local news reports indicate that at least seven Amazon warehouses in the US have confirmed cases of COVID-19.

Amazon has also had confirmed coronavirus cases in three of its European warehouses.

Amazon has had to balance the safety of its employees against skyrocketing demand for its services amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Amazon now has COVID-19 cases across 10 of its warehouses globally and faces growing pressure from unions and workers-rights groups to close its facilities.

Local news outlets have reported that there are seven cases in Amazon's warehouses: In New York, Kentucky, Florida, Texas, Michigan, Connecticut, and Oklahoma, workers have tested positive for COVID-19, the illness caused by the novel coronavirus.

Last week, a delivery station in Queens, New York, was temporarily closed; it was the first US Amazon facility to detect a case of the virus.

Athena, a workers-rights advocacy group, said workers at Amazon's warehouse in Staten Island, New York, had to continue working while the facility was being cleaned after the case was confirmed this week.

Amazon had already confirmed that three warehouses in Europe (two in Spain and one in Italy) had cases of the virus, but it ruled out closing warehouses, prompting its Italian workers to strike.

Amazon has kept its warehouses running even with confirmed COVID-19 cases

Mary Altaffer/AP Images

Some workers have voiced concerns that as Amazon ramps up its workforce to cope with the spiking demand they are not adequately protected.

"As of Tuesday afternoon, there was no plan to shut down" the facility in Staten Island, Athena said.

While Amazon has temporarily closed some facilities for deep cleaning in the wake of COVID-19 cases, it has not halted operations at any.

This contrasts with the treatment of white-collar tech workers — Amazon and other major US tech firms have closed offices and mandated that these employees work from home.

Commenting on the latest case in New York, an Amazon spokeswoman said: "We are supporting the individual who is recovering. We are following guidelines from local officials and are taking extreme measures to ensure the safety of employees at our site."

She added that the employee was last onsite on March 11 and that Amazon had asked anyone who had contact with them to take 14 days of paid leave.

Amazon has altered its warehouse policies since the outbreak as it tries to balance worker safety with a huge spike in online orders from people staying at home. It has introduced a 3-foot distance rule for its workers, scrapped security checks at its gates, and put out hand sanitizer and spray bottles with disinfectant. The company said it had also increased cleanings in its facilities.

Some workers told Business Insider that these measures were not necessarily effective — that workers were still packed together in an enclosed space and that in some warehouses the sanitizing equipment for workers had either run out or were stolen.

A worker in Jacksonville, Florida — which also has a confirmed case — told Business Insider that communication about the virus was "very, very poor."

"Amazon, like Trump, was slow to respond, vague with the truth, and values dollars over lives," they added.

SIX Amazon warehouses have been hit by the coronavirus outbreak, with employees saying the company isn't doing enough to protect their safety

Workers in six Amazon warehouses in the US have tested positive for coronavirus. The latest was in Jacksonville, Florida.

A worker at a nearby facility told Business Insider that "Amazon, like Trump, was slow to respond, vague with the truth, and values dollars over lives."

Another Amazon employee told Business Insider that they continue to ship non-essential items, such as prom dresses and expensive watches.

Workers at six Amazon warehouses across the US have contracted the novel coronavirus, with the latest report of a positive test coming on Tuesday at a fulfilment center in Jacksonville, Florida.

US employees have now tested positive for COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, at warehouses in Florida, Michigan, New York, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Texas, The Washington Post reported.

A worker at a different Amazon fulfilment center in Jacksonville told Business Insider that whispers of a positive COVID-19 test spread through their facility early on Tuesday. The company itself never made a formal announcement.

"Communication is very, very poor," the source said, requesting anonymity out of fear of losing their job. "A lot of unhappy employees," they continued, adding that "Amazon, like Trump, was slow to respond, vague with the truth, and values dollars over lives."

In a statement, an Amazon spokesperson told Business Insider that the company is "supporting the individuals, following guidelines from local officials," and that it is "taking extreme measures to ensure the safety of all the employees at our sites." Business Insider asked for additional comments on specific employee complaints and will update as necessary.


The first report of a positive COVID-19 test at an Amazon warehouse came on March 18. In that case, workers at a fulfilment center in Queens received a text informing them of the result, The Atlantic reported.

An employee at the Queens facility, requesting anonymity, told Business Insider that the company has now stopped holding "stand up" meetings at the beginning shifts. Workers had complained that the meetings required them to congregate shoulder to shoulder, in violation of guidelines from the US Centers for Disease Control. It has also suspended its per-hour targets for order fulfilment at that warehouse.

That employee also sent Business Insider a photo from their break room which indicates that, at least in one warehouse, employees are being instructed to remain three feet apart, not six, per the CDC. The recommendations are in line with the Word Health Organization's recommendation to "Maintain at least 1 metre (3 feet) distance between yourself and anyone who is coughing or sneezing."

THIS SIGN IS WRONG IT IS SIX FEET APART OR 2 METERS

A poster at an Amazon warehouse in Queens, New York. Anonymous

And while online shopping has helped many Americans avoid the risk of crowds, the employee said Amazon's claim that it's only shipping vital goods — which would allow for greater social distancing at its own warehouses — isn't borne out by their experience.

"I wouldn't call a prom dress or a Rolex 'essential items,'" they told Business Insider.


HEALTH
Exclusive: Amazon Confirms First Known Coronavirus Case in an American Warehouse

Workers at the Queens, New York, facility say employees were expected to come in for their night shift after the case was identified. Amazon denies this.

OLGA KHAZANMARCH 18, 2020

Workers at an Amazon f​ulfillment center in Staten Is​land

HIROKO MASUIKE / THE NEW YORK TIMES / REDUX

Editor's Note: The Atlantic is making vital coverage of the coronavirus available to all readers. Find the collection here.

Workers at an Amazon warehouse in Queens, New York, received a text Wednesday evening that they long feared might come: “We’re writing to let you know that a positive case of the coronavirus (COVID-19) was found at our facility today.”

This is the realization of a major threat to Amazon’s operations. Millions of people across the nation are cloistered inside their homes, many of them relying on the company to provide basic goods. Amazon is already struggling to meet demand, and some employees feel they’re being unfairly endangered by working in warehouses filled with other workers. It’s unclear how deliveries could continue if the workers who sort, pack, and ship Americans’ goods start getting sick in droves.

Though two office workers at Amazon’s Seattle headquarters have been diagnosed with COVID-19, this is the first confirmed case of the disease among the company’s hourly warehouse employees in the United States. These workers make up the majority of Amazon’s 600,000-strong workforce.

According to the text, which was sent by a member of a workers’ group called Amazonians United, management sent day-shift workers home in order to disinfect the sorting facility, known as DBK1. Jonathan Bailey, an employee who sorts packages at the Queens facility, told me that workers were not notified of the positive case by Amazon management; he learned of it from other employees. He said workers believed that they were still expected to report for their night shift. In an email to The Atlantic, Amazon denied this, saying that it notified all associates about the positive test, and that workers were not expected to come in for their night shift.

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Rena Lunak, an Amazon spokesperson, confirmed to The Atlantic that there was a positive case at the facility, but did not reveal the person’s identity. “We are supporting the individual who is now in quarantine,” she said. “In addition to our enhanced daily deep cleaning, we’ve temporarily closed the Queens delivery station for additional sanitation and have sent associates home with full pay.”

The incident rattled some of the warehouse workers, who already feel they are being underpaid for a risky job: continuing to work in close proximity to others during a dangerous pandemic. “This clearly shows a disregard for our health and safety,” said Bailey, who is also a member of Amazonians United.

On March 11, Amazon announced that all employees diagnosed with COVID-19 or placed in quarantine would receive two weeks of sick pay. In addition, Amazon gave hourly workers unlimited unpaid time off through the end of March.

But some Amazon workers—including those in New York City, where positive cases have spiked sharply in the past 48 hours—have expressed concern that these measures have been insufficient to protect them from the coronavirus. As of this writing, there are 1,871 known cases of the coronavirus in the city, and officials expect that number to rise dramatically. What’s more, research suggests that the virus can live on cardboard for 24 hours, so there’s a possibility that packages sick employees send may be contagious.

Earlier this week, Amazonians United NYC released a petition, signed by more than 1,500 workers, in which they demanded that the company provide paid sick leave to all its employees, even those who do not have a positive COVID-19 diagnosis, given the scarcity of coronavirus tests. They also requested child-care funds for workers with children, increased hazard pay, an end to penalties for working too slowly, and an immediate closure of any facility where a worker tests positive. (Amazon did not respond to a question about how long DBK1 was or will be closed.)

The coronavirus outbreak will be especially challenging for Amazon, which is facing a surge of orders as Americans socially distance by remaining at home, and as traditional brick-and-mortar shops close their doors. On Monday, Amazon announced plans to hire 100,000 more warehouse workers to meet the growing demand, and the company added $2 to American warehouse workers’ hourly pay.

Workers in several of the company’s European warehouses have contracted the virus, and Amazon opted to keep those facilities open, prompting outcry from workers. In both Spain and Italy, which have high rates of the coronavirus, the company has nevertheless kept facilities open.

The outbreak sets up an uncomfortable tension for the shipping giant: between maintaining worker safety and delivering packages on time. Dale Rogers, a professor of supply-chain management at Arizona State University, said that although Amazon could mitigate some warehouse-employee absences through automation, if Amazon logistics employees, who drive the packages from the distribution centers to homes, start getting sick en masse, “that could be catastrophic.” Meanwhile, other experts have speculated that shutting down several distribution facilities at once would greatly hamper Amazon’s ability to make deliveries, especially since customers now expect them in a couple of days or less.

Late tonight, Bailey and other workers arrived at the Queens warehouse and refused to work their shift, effectively shutting down the facility, he said. One worker told me that she wished she could just stay at home with pay, like so many white-collar Americans are doing now.

“We should be home with our families in quarantine like most everyone else is,” said the worker at the DBK1 warehouse, who requested anonymity because she feared retaliation for speaking out. She said she was planning on staying home from work tonight after hearing of the positive result. “We’re putting our lives in danger.”


OLGA KHAZAN is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Weird: The Power of Being an Outsider in an Insider World.

Los Angeles mayor rebuts Trump and warns the city is 'days away' from fate of New York

Charles Davis 3/24/2020

Los Angeles Mayor Garcetti speaks during a news conference. Thomson Reuters

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said the city is anywhere from six to twelve days away from the sort of crisis currently facing New York City.

"The premature announcement that we can see that light at the end of the tunnel — I'd say we're just entering that tunnel, right now, and we need to be prepared for some of the darkness that lies ahead," Garcetti said.

Eleven people in Los Angeles County have now died due to COVID-19, including one teenager.

Los Angeles is just a week or two away from the fate of New York City, where hospitals are being overwhelmed with a surge in patients suffering from COVID-19 — and neither it nor the nation is anywhere near ready to return to business as usual, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said Tuesday night.

"To place the economy before individuals, profits before people — that will cost lives," Garcetti said in a forceful rebuke of President Donald Trump, who suggested social-distancing measures could be rescinded by April 12.

Earlier in the day, President Trump said he would like to see the country "opened up and just raring to go by Easter."

The mayor called that wishful thinking. "I think we owe it to everyone to be straightforward and honest," Garcetti said. Restrictions currently in place, including an order for Los Angeles residents to remain in their homes, could be necessary for "a couple months," not just a couple more days.

"The premature announcement that we can see that light at the end of the tunnel — I'd say we're just entering that tunnel, right now, and we need to be prepared for some of the darkness that lies ahead," Garcetti continued.


On Tuesday, officials in Los Angeles County, home to more than 10 million people, announced that more than 660 residents were now confirmed to be infected with COVID-19. A teenager with the disease died of septic shock, the Los Angeles Times reported, bringing the county's death toll to 11.

The mayor warned that the worst was yet to come. "I did some calculations, and we are anywhere from about six to 12 days behind what we are seeing in New York City." As of Tuesday evening, the virus had resulted in the deaths of 131 NYC residents, The New York Times reported, with the city accounting for 60 percent of new cases, nationally, according Dr. Deborah Birx, a member of the White House coronavirus task force.

Garcetti said Los Angeles has neither enough medical supplies nor medical professionals to adequately deal with what's coming. And while praising the Trump administration's invocation of war-time powers to manufacture more testing kits, he said it would be of little use to Los Angeles if those kits were not delivered immediately.

"Now is the time for partnerships, and not for politics," he said. "We can't wish coronavirus away."

---30---

Doctors and nurses on their risks, fears — and hard decisions — in coronavirus pandemic
Caitlin Dickson Reporter,Yahoo News•March 25, 2020

Life in the United States and around the world has effectively been put on hold as social distancing has become the strategy of choice against the spread of the coronavirus, which as of Wednesday morning had infected 55,238 and killed 802 in the U.S. Millions are working from home or are out of work entirely, while schools in much of the country are closed.

While the general public is being strongly advised to stay indoors, doctors, nurses and other health care providers can’t work from home. They are facing a new reality of their own, as hospitals and clinics prepare for an imminent influx of coronavirus patients.

This is the second in a series of interviews by Yahoo News with health care providers in different parts of the country. This installment looks at the ways the coronavirus pandemic is reaching beyond emergency rooms and frontline medical workers to affect other parts of the health care system. All the providers who spoke to Yahoo News asked that their names and hospitals not be disclosed, because they were not authorized by their employers to speak to the press.
‘We’re forced to go into a situation that we’re recommending the rest of the world not to be in.’

Many hospitals around the country have begun canceling elective procedures in order to free up bed space, equipment and personnel to make room for more likely coronavirus patients. But one surgeon at a large California hospital pointed out that the kinds of procedures that require intensive care are rarely elective, and those can’t simply be canceled even amid a pandemic. The surgeon was not authorized to speak to the press, and asked that his identity, including his specialty, not be disclosed out of concern for his job. However, the types of surgeries he performs are typically emergent, with at least 50 percent or more of his patients requiring recovery time in the intensive care unit, he said.

“You hear on the news that we’re gonna free up all these ICU beds, but that’s really hard to do,” he said. “In an ideal world, we wouldn’t do surgery anymore.” However, there are still “people who don’t have coronavirus [who are] dealing with issues that are life-threatening,” he said, noting that patients continue to be admitted into the ICU with heart failure, strokes and sepsis, among other urgent conditions.

“We can’t say we’re not going to do your surgery because of the potential need [for future coronavirus patients], but every time you do that you’re limiting the number of beds that will be available next week.”

So far the surgeon said he has not been in the position of having to deny a patient a lifesaving procedure to make room for a coronavirus patient, but he worries about that possibility as the number of cases continues to grow. As of Wednesday morning, data from Johns Hopkins University showed that there were 2,628 confirmed cases of the coronavirus in California, including 54 fatalities.

“Eventually, we’ve been told, there’s not going to be enough ventilators and ICU beds, but those beds don’t just appear, right?”

A nurse at MedStar St. Mary’s Hospital in Leonardtown, Md., works outside a patient’s room in the intensive care unit Tuesday. Hospitals around the United States are continuing to prepare for an expected onslaught of cases related to COVID-19 in the days ahead. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)More

Even as the hospital takes steps to prepare for an impending surge in coronavirus patients, the surgeon expressed shock and concern over what he described as inconsistency between the social distancing measures prescribed for the general public and what is being practiced by health care providers and other hospital staff.

“In the outside world, we’re told to stay 6 feet away from each other and not interact. Then you walk around the hospital and people are having lunch together. You walk into a resident workroom and six people are working on computers, [none of them] wearing masks.

“I don’t know if people have a false sense of security because [they’re] not in the real world, but we know of patients who are asymptomatic,” he said. “In my mind, I think every time you go into a new room you should put on a new mask, but people aren’t doing that.”

The surgeon described what he’s observed as “two worlds” within the hospital: one where certain nurses and doctors, especially anesthesiologists and emergency room personnel, appear to be “wearing masks all day,” and another in which no one is wearing a mask, including housekeeping and cafeteria workers.

CDC recommendations regarding who needs to wear a mask and when continue to evolve along with the coronavirus pandemic — largely shifting in response to supply shortages created by increased demand.

While the surgeon acknowledged that “we don’t have enough resources to treat every single patient like they have the disease,” he worries that failure to take sufficient precautions could result in significant spread of the coronavirus among health care workers.

“We’re screwed,” he said. “We’re forced to go into a situation that we’re recommending the rest of the world not to be in.”

Like other doctors, he worries less about how his own exposure could impact members of his family.

“I don’t let my kids in my own car anymore because I’m worried my car has germs in there,” he said. “It’s impossible not to be exposed to someone sick in the hospital.”

Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, pictured on March 16. U.S. hospitals are setting up triage tents, calling doctors out of retirement, guarding their supplies of face masks and making plans to cancel elective surgery as they brace for an onslaught of COVID-19 patients. (Paul Sancya/AP)More

‘If people were to take us as leaders or examples for how to act in this situation, we’re doing a horrible job.’

The surgeon in California is not the only one noticing a disparity between the way health care workers are interacting as opposed to the rest of the public.

“In my personal life, I feel like everyone is isolating, social distancing,” said a nurse in the NICU, the neonatal intensive care unit, at a large hospital in the Midwest. But in the hospital, she said, health care workers are still clustered in halls and eating in communal break rooms, touching elevator buttons and opening doors.

“It feels really hypocritical to be a health care provider and encouraging other people to not do everything that we do as soon as we walk through the doors, said the nurse, who also asked that her name and hospital not be disclosed because she was not authorized to speak to the press. “If people were to take us as leaders or examples for how to act in this situation, we’re doing a horrible job.”

“I was literally dreading going to work because of how much more at risk I felt than in day-to-day life at home,” she said. Even her own efforts to regularly disinfect her personal workspace and any surfaces touched by her patients feel inefficient and wasteful.

“It’s a lot of cleaning up after myself and other people over and over again. That’s not what you should be doing when trying to provide patient care,” she said.

As an NICU nurse, she is not directly treating confirmed or suspected coronavirus patients, but she is being trained to respond to a new patient population emerging from the pandemic: pregnant women who’ve tested positive for COVID-19.

A minimum of three health care providers from the NICU — a nurse, a doctor and a respiratory therapist — are required to attend all high-risk deliveries. Those include cases of fetal distress (such as low heart rate) and any delivery by a mother before her 37th week. Now, she said, deliveries involving a coronavirus-positive mother are also considered high risk.

A midwife shows a newborn to medical workers after a Cesarean section delivery on a suspected COVID-19 patient in Wuhan Union Hospital in Wuhan in central China’s Hubei province on March 7. The hospital’s ob-gyn department has been designated to take care of women with the coronavirus disease since the outbreak. (Feature China/Barcroft Media via Getty Images)More

Between the labor and delivery team and the NICU team, she said there can be up to 20 people present for a high-risk delivery. If the mother has tested positive for the coronavirus, all those people have to be wearing personal protective equipment, which they must each put on according to protocol in a negative pressure isolation room, known as an anteroom, before they enter the delivery room.

Under new visitor restrictions adopted by many hospitals, mothers who haven’t tested positive for the coronavirus are now allowed only one visitor in the delivery room. For those who have been infected with the virus, she said, “I don’t know if those moms are allowed [to have] anyone ... which is so sad. I can’t imagine being a laboring mom alone, with no one in there with you.”

The nurse who spoke to Yahoo News said that her hospital has established a sort of “makeshift COVID labor and delivery floor” with a handful of rooms designated for mothers with the coronavirus to give birth. They’ve started setting up carts of protective equipment outside those rooms; however, at this point only one of them is equipped with a proper anteroom.

“The rest are just regular rooms where we’re saying, ‘Never mind, it’s OK not to have an anteroom. Just put on the PPE outside the door and hope for the best,’” she said, adding that part of her training for this new type of delivery included instructions to “open the door as little as you need to in order to shimmy in and out.”

As with any high-risk delivery, the NICU team’s role is to determine whether the baby appears well enough to go to the regular postpartum floor or if the baby is in distress and needs to be taken to the NICU. For babies born to mothers with COVID-19, she said, the assumption is that the newborn is also positive for the virus, and those that are “well-appearing” upon delivery must be taken to an isolation room on the postpartum floor.

A medical staff member attends to a baby with the coronavirus at the Wuhan Children’s Hospital, in Wuhan, China, on March 6. (China Daily via Reuters)

For all the training she’s received on how to handle these new types of deliveries, the nurse said there are still a lot of unanswered questions. Based on what she was told, she said that mothers who’ve tested positive for the coronavirus must remain separated from their baby as long as they’re in the hospital, which, she said, “has a lot of consequences for mental health, feeding, production of breast milk.” But it’s not clear whether, if the baby is ready to be discharged before the mother, who will be able to take the baby home, as the father or partner is also presumed to have been exposed to the coronavirus if they and the mother live together.

“It’s these horrible, heartbreaking situations where we’re talking about finding another family support person to come pick up the baby,” she said.

The NICU nurse said that so far she hasn’t participated in any coronavirus deliveries yet but is already aware of at least one pregnant patient who has tested positive. “It’s very much not a matter of if, just when” it will happen, she said. She worries about how the elaborate, time-consuming process of putting on and removing personal protective equipment and carefully entering and exiting the makeshift COVID delivery rooms will play out in a real-life emergency situation.

“We’re a very well oiled machine, so it’s a very anxious feeling to have so many unknowns in how to provide safe, effective care for people,” she said. “This just feels like chaos.”
‘Every day I go into work thinking, “I don’t want to be that Kirkland nursing home.” That would be the worst-case scenario.’

The impacts of the coronavirus on the health care system stretch beyond the different units of a hospital. The medical director of one mid-Atlantic residential addiction treatment facility told Yahoo News: “Every day I go into work thinking, ‘I don’t want to be that Kirkland nursing home.’ That would be the worst-case scenario.”

The medical director asked that his name and the location of the facility (which includes the state in its name) not be mentioned because it is part of a small addiction treatment community that could easily be traced back to him. But the facility is located in a state that, as of Wednesday morning, had fewer than 400 confirmed cases of the coronavirus.

“We’re not a hospital per se, but we’re a health care facility,” he said, explaining that, unlike at a hospital, the facility’s staff doesn’t have the kind of universal training in infection control practices.

“We give medications and things like that, but we’re not doing very high-level medical care,” he said. “The premise is, if you’re sick you get sent out.”

“Now if you have somebody who has a fever, it’s a major issue,” he said.

The average length of stay at this facility is between 20 and 30 days. They don’t take Medicare or Medicaid, and about 85 percent are covered by private insurance. There are approximately 70 patients and 30 or so staff, he said, so there are about 100 people in the building at a given moment, and it’s a “relatively small space.”

“Up until last week we had a cafeteria in which 50 people easily would be eating, sitting, more or less right next to each other,” he said. The patients would “go from there to various groups with 20-30 patients in a small room.”

Even though patients have TVs in their rooms and have been watching the news about the coronavirus spreading over the past few weeks, the medical director said, “For the longest time I was kind of surprised there wasn’t a whole lot of uproar among patients and staff, up until last week. This last week sort of hit home for a lot of people, I think.”

Several people actually signed out of the facility after a rumor started circulating that the governor was going to enact a shelter-in-place order preventing them from leaving.

“It was a false rumor, but [it was] the kind of thing that has thrown everything up in air,” he said. Since then, the facility has made a variety of changes, including allowing only 10 people to eat in the cafeteria at a time. It has also started working on transitioning some group therapy to a virtual conferencing platform instead of in-person meetings.

Though he said employees are not supposed to come to work if they have any symptoms, there’s been a sense of panic among some of the staff.

“Several staff members who are not young and have chronic medical conditions, asthma, etc., are appropriately concerned about walking around a building with 100 people in petty close proximity,” he said.

A doctor walks outside the Life Care Center of Kirkland, a long-term care facility linked to several confirmed coronavirus cases, in Kirkland, Wash., on March 5. (Lindsey Wasson/Reuters/File Photo)

While he believes the treatment facility should follow the CDC’s recommendation that anyone confirmed or suspected to have the coronavirus who does not need to be hospitalized should self-quarantine at home, he also noted that determining whether to send a sick patient home from the facility he runs presents a uniquely difficult dilemma.

“One thing we always keep in mind is every decision we make is based on the safety of the patients,” he said. “But in our particular case, a lot of the time people are not safe if they’re not in treatment.”

“If you have an alcoholic with liver disease, which is a frequent type of patient, [and] they go home and start drinking again, they are going to die from alcohol,” he explained. “In the case of patients who’ve been discharged from hospital [who are] still kind of semi-sick, we’ll take them back because the alternative is worse.”

For example, he said a patient was recently sent to the hospital because he was sick, and while he was there, it was discovered that this patient, who is already in the late stages of alcoholic liver disease, is also diabetic.

“He could’ve been admitted, and I think should've been admitted, [but] because of the COVID thing, I think there were not as many beds. [The hospital was] pushing to discharge him,” he said. “I had a choice of saying he’s too medically unstable to come back to us, but in that case he would go home and very likely drink again and become much sicker faster.” He decided to take the patient back to the treatment facility, even though he wasn’t fully medically stable.

The medical director said he’s often put in this type of position in his job. “The only thing that changes it with COVID is, you’re risking other patients’ safety by keeping them there.”

“Ethically, I have a responsibility to my staff and the other patients to keep them as safe as I can, and we also have responsibility to patients who may have COVID,” he said. “There’s a competing ethic there, where that person may be safer in our facility by not drinking or drugging, but they may also [be] causing significant risk to patients and staff.”

Trump needs governors to reopen the economy. Even Republican ones aren’t on board.


Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R) caused a stir Monday night by going on Fox News and suggesting older people like him needed to “take a chance” with their lives in the name of reopening the economy during the coronavirus outbreak.

The man in charge of making that decision in Texas, though, has a very different take. As he confronts imposing even stricter measures for the Lone Star State, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) responded Tuesday to a question about Patrick’s comments.

“I will base my decision as governor of the state of Texas on what physicians say,” Abbott said. “If the goal is to get the economy going, the best thing we can do to get the economy going is to get covid-19 behind us.”

President Trump has leaned hard into the idea of reopening the economy in recent days, but as has been noted, he only has so much power to do so. It’s the governors who issue stay-at-home orders and decide what opens and what doesn’t in their states.

Few of them are echoing Trump right now, which suggests that even if Trump decides he wants to reopen things — on Tuesday, he set a target date of Easter, April 12 — he won’t be able to do it in any large measure.

Another Republican governor, Maryland’s Larry Hogan, had some choice words for Trump’s idea on Tuesday, referring to an “imaginary clock.”

“We don’t think that we’re going to be in any way ready to be out of this in five or six days, or whenever this 15 days is up from the time that they started this imaginary clock,” Hogan said on CNN. “Most people think that we’re weeks away from the peak, if not months.”

South Dakota Gov. Kristi L. Noem (R), whose state matches the description of less-affected areas that Trump has suggested could see reopenings in relatively short order, also indicated that she’s looking at a longer time frame.

“This situation is not going to be over in a week,” said Noem, whose state has just over two dozen cases. “… We have another eight weeks until we see our peak infection rate.”

She added, “Any changes we make for how we conduct our daily lives have to be sustained.”

Democrats had even more choice words for Trump’s proposal, with Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker saying Trump was “not taking into account the true damage that this will do to our country if we see truly millions of people die.” Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said Trump’s “off-the-cuff statements are really going to undermine our ability to protect people.” California Gov. Gavin Newsom said he and Trump are “clearly operating under a different set of assumptions.”

New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) said: “If you ask the American people to choose between public health and the economy, then it’s no contest. No American is going to say accelerate the economy at the cost of human life. Job one has to be save lives. That has to be the priority.”

But plenty of Republicans also made their differences rather clear.

“The truth is that protecting people and protecting the economy is not mutually exclusive,” said Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R). “In fact, one depends upon the other. The fact is we save our economy by first saving lives, and we have to do it in that order.”

DeWine added, “When people are dying, when people don’t feel safe, this economy is not coming back.”

DeWine, though, maintained that he was generally “aligned” with Trump on coronavirus, and he wasn’t the only one declining to completely distance himself from the president. Democratic Oregon Gov. Kate Brown said she felt she understood Trump’s inclination.

“I am not interested in unnecessarily closing down businesses and taking jobs if we don’t need to do that,” said Brown, who issued tough restrictions on Monday. “The goal of my executive order was to balance those competing demands. … While I don’t agree with what the president said and how he said it, I think that’s what he was trying to say.”

Brown added: “When I was on the phone with him earlier this week, he clearly said that these difficult decisions are in the hands of governors. So I would expect that it to stay that way.”

That’s the key takeaway. However much Trump wants to reopen the country, he’ll need governors to cooperate with that. The governors listed above represent five of the seven biggest states and more than 40 percent of the U.S. population, and they’re just the ones who have weighed in so far. Most of the other biggest states are also run by Democrats, who wouldn’t be as inclined to align themselves with Trump on a controversial proposal.

As president, Trump can change the federal guidance, but it’s just that: guidance. Experts say he doesn’t have many legal tools to override the precautions taken by state and local officials.

These governors also have to deal with problems on a more micro level and are more directly held responsible for what happens in their states. Any of them who would begin opening things up would put themselves in line for whatever criticism might follow from the fallout, and it would be much easier to readily quantify the effects of those decisions in their states — particularly if they can be compared with other states that took tougher stances.

If Trump truly wants to set the ball in motion on this, he’s got about 50 people he should be talking to about it. Right now, they seem pretty skeptical.

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Coronavirus stimulus package set to ban stock buybacks for companies that get aid

Aided companies also wouldn’t be able to issue dividends

March 25, 2020 By Victor Reklaitis

Time to say bye-bye to Boeing’s buybacks? Bloomberg News
As Washington works on delivering a massive coronavirus econonmic stimulus package, lawmakers have felt pressure to ban any companies that receive aid from repurchasing their shares.

A provision that does exactly that looks set to be included in the package that Democrats and Republicans have agreed on.

See:Airlines and Boeing want a bailout — but look how much they’ve spent on stock buybacks

In a letter to colleagues on Wednesday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said a prohibition on buybacks was among the changes that Democratic lawmakers had made to the legislation initially proposed by Senate Republicans.


There is a provision to “ban stock buybacks for the term of the government assistance plus 1 year on any company receiving a government loan from the bill,” the New York Democrat wrote.

Aided companies also are expected to be prohibited from paying dividends on common stock, with that ban ending a year after their government loan has been paid off.

Related:Lobbyists have asked U.S. government for at least $2.3 trillion in aid

The Senate was on track to pass the $2 trillion stimulus package on Wednesday, while House lawmakers were expected to try to approve the package on Thursday. A final bill text was not yet available.

U.S. stocks DJIA, +2.39% SPX, +1.15% have been hammered this month by coronavirus-related worries, but they closed sharply higher Tuesday, with analysts pinning the gains on stimulus hopes. The Dow industrials also were advancing on Wednesday afternoon.

FOX NEWS BRIT HUME SAYS COMMIT SUICIDE FOR THE ECONOMY, YOU FIRST BRIT 

Fox News political analyst on saving the U.S. economy over people’s lives: It’s ‘entirely reasonable’

March 25, 2020 By Shawn Langlois

Brit Hume. Fox News

Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, in a controversial view earlier this week, said that plenty of older people would be willing to sacrifice their lives in order to preserve the economy for their grandchildren.

“No one reached out to me and said, as a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?” he said. “And if that’s the exchange, I’m all in.”

After his comments blew up the internet, Fox News senior political analyst Brit Hume visited Tucker Carlson’s show Tuesday to share his thoughts on what he sees as an “entirely reasonable” position:

‘We don’t shut down the economy to save every single life that’s threatened by a widespread disease. We just don’t.’

Hume went on to say that this concept is essentially what President Trump and Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York have been saying in recent days about the coronavirus pandemic.

“What we’re living in now, this circumstance as we try to beat this virus, is not sustainable,” Hume, 76 years old, explained on the show. “That the utter collapse of the country’s economy, which many think will happen if this goes on much longer, is an intolerable result.”

Watch the clip:

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Like Patrick before him, Hume emerged as a trending topic on Twitter TWTR, +0.46% overnight, where he was mostly hammered, though a few stood up in his defense.

JUST DO IT!
Glenn Beck offers to die to save America from a COVID-19 shutdown

IDJIT
Texas' lieutenant governor suggests grandparents are willing to die for US economy

Here’s what Mario Draghi says Europe must do now to prevent coronavirus recession ‘from morphing into a prolonged depression’

‘Much higher public debt’ to become ‘permanent feature’ of European economies, says former ECB chief

Mario Draghi AFP/Getty Images
March 25, 2020 By William Watts

‘The challenge we face now is how to act now with sufficient strength and speed to prevent the recession from morphing into a prolonged depression, made deeper by a plethora of defaults leaving irreversible damage.’— Mario Draghi

That is former European Central Bank President Mario Draghi in a guest column (paywall) Wednesday published by the Financial Times, warning that European governments have no time to waste and must be prepared to “fully mobilize” the financial sector to prevent job losses, save businesses and avert an economic catastrophe as a result of the global COVID-19 pandemic.

Draghi, whose nonrenewable eight-year term ended at the end of October, said the solution will inevitably require a significant rise in public debt. Meanwhile, the loss of income incurred by the private sector, including any debt raised to fill the hole, will need to be absorbed by government balance sheets.

“Much higher public debt levels will become a permanent feature of our economies and will be accompanied by private debt cancellation,” said the Italian economist whose term was defined by his 2012 “whatever it takes” pledge to preserve the euro at the height of Europe’s debt crisis.

The only effective way for European governments to “reach immediately into every crack of the economy is to fully mobilize their entire financial systems,” Draghi said, noting that banks, in particular, extend across the entire economy and “can create money instantly by allowing overdrafts or opening credit facilities.”

Since it’s crucial to prevent job losses in the first place, banks must rapidly lend funds at zero cost to companies, he said. And since they would be serving as a public-policy vehicle, the capital they need must be provided by the government in the form of state guarantees on all additional overdrafts or loans — and the cost of those guarantees shouldn’t be based on the credit risk of the company that receives them, but should be zero regardless of the cost of funding of the government that issues them, Draghi argued.

Draghi said that while public debt levels must rise, the alternative would be a “permanent destruction” of productive capacity and the fiscal base — and that would be “much more destructive to the economy and to government credit.”

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G-7 agreement stalled over Pompeo’s insistence on labelling illness ‘Wuhan virus’

Foreign ministers refuse to go along; WHO has rejected geographic name because of its global reach

March 25, 2020 By Associated Press

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo speaks during a news 

conference at the State Department on Wednesday. Associated Press

WASHINGTON — Foreign ministers from the Group of 7 leading industrialized democracies sparred Wednesday over whether to call out China as the source of the coronavirus pandemic.

Meeting by video conference because of the outbreak, the ministers agreed on the need for joint efforts to halt the spread of the virus, known as COVID-19. But U.S. and European diplomats said the ministers were unable to agree on Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s call for COVID-19 to be identified by name as the “Wuhan virus.”

As a result, just a day after G-7 finance ministers and central bankers issued a joint communique referring to “COVID-19,” the foreign ministers opted against releasing a group statement. U.S, officials pointed to Tuesday’s finance ministers’ statement to reject suggestions of G-7 disunity and said the foreign ministers had never intended to release their own communique.

European officials said Pompeo had insisted on identifying COVID-19 as the “Wuhan virus” even though the World Health Organization and others have cautioned against giving it a geographic name because of its global nature. In recent weeks, Pompeo has stepped up his use of “Wuhan virus,” accusing China of putting the world at risk by not revealing more details about the outbreak, which was first reported in the city of Wuhan.

President Donald Trump had until very recently frequently referred to COVID-19 as the “China virus” or the “Chinese virus,” but since the beginning of this week has steered away from those terms as critics have said they foster discriminatory sentiments and behavior against Asians and Asian Americans.

In a solo news conference after the meeting, Pompeo again referred to the “Wuhan virus,” saying it was “the most pressing agenda item.” He said all the foreign ministers had “committed to fighting (it) with transparency, as is necessary all around the world.” He did not deny there had been disagreements over what to call the virus, but said all the ministers had acknowledged that China had not been forthcoming about its details early on and was now trying to shift the narrative about it.

“Every one of the nations that was at that meeting this morning was deeply aware of the disinformation campaign that the Chinese Communist Party is engaged in to try and deflect from what has really taken place here,” Pompeo said.

Other foreign ministers were not nearly as emphatic in their own comments about the meeting, with at least one leaving open the suggestion that China is not the only country trying to use the outbreak to advance political points.

French Foreign Minister Yves Le Drian said in a statement that he had “underscored the need to combat any attempt to exploit the crisis for political purposes and expressed the view that the unity of all in order to effectively combat the pandemic must now take precedence over any other considerations.”

The disagreement over the virus terminology was first reported by the German publication Der Spiegal. German officials said they were more concerned about what would come from a virtual summit of the Group of 20 nations leaders that is supposed to be held on Thursday at the request of Saudi Arabia.

U.S. officials meanwhile downplayed the disagreement among the foreign ministers and pointed to the G-7 finance ministers’ statement from Tuesday that did not mention either “Wuhan” or “China” in relation to the virus and instead referred to it repeatedly as COVID-19.

The Big Fix: What can COVID-19 teach us about the global climate crisis?


The World March 24, 2020 · By Anna Kusmer

Listen to the story.



Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg takes part in the 

''Europe Climate Strike'' rally in Brussels, Belgium, March 6, 2020.
Credit: Johanna Geron/Reuters

“Every crisis deserves to be treated as a crisis,” Greta Thunberg posted online this month when she announced that her weekly school strike — organized through her Fridays for the Future — was going virtual due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Thunberg draws a clear connection between the climate crisis and the current pandemic.

Related: How a Caribbean island nation is trying to become climate resilient

And some of those parallels are clear. Both pose grave threats to the health and well-being of billions of people, and both call into question fundamental aspects of our society: How can we reconfigure the economy? How do we make high-stakes decisions about complex problems with high levels of uncertainty?

The connection between climate change and the pandemic has become increasingly clear in recent weeks. Since the virus began to spread from China throughout the world, experts have witnessed massive drops in carbon emissions and pollution in the hardest-hit countries — although the lauded environmental benefits will likely be short-lived.

In February, China’s carbon emissions dropped by 25% compared to the same time last year, according to data from the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air.

“We saw huge drastic reductions,” said CREC analyst Sunil Dahiya.

The drop in China primarily comes from a decrease in coal-fired electricity generation, then manufacturing industries, and then aviation, Dahiya said. Coal consumption in China is down 36%, and construction has been halted in many places, reducing the need for steel, concrete and other materials.

Related: China announces a new ban on single-use plastics

Duniya said he expects to see similar decreases in Europe, South Asia, the Middle East and the United States — practically everywhere — as the virus continues to spread and halt industry and travel.

“Global CO2 [carbon dioxide] reduction will depend on how much each economy is dependent on the use of fossil fuels,” he said.

Air pollution is also down in affected countries. Pollutants associated with cars, like nitrous oxide and particulate matter, saw steep declines in China and northern Italy, decreasing by up to 30% of their normal values.

“I think that in human history, in the past few centuries at least, we could not observe something like this. ... It’s really a sudden shock, and it’s really concentrated.”Marco Percoco, transportation economics researcher, Bocconi University, Milan, Italy

“I think that in human history, in the past few centuries at least, we could not observe something like this,” said Marco Percoco, a transportation economics researcher at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy. “It’s really a sudden shock, and it’s really concentrated.”

While reductions in pollution and carbon emissions may seem like a silver lining of the pandemic, experts say the benefits will be short-lived — and may actually backfire.

Drops in emissions from previous economic recessions have always returned to their pre-recession emission levels. Duniya said China has already started increasing emissions as the number of new virus cases has leveled off.

“The current decline in global emissions is not a development we should be happy abou. ... This is happening because of a major economic meltdown, and not as a result of well-designed energy policies.”Fatih Birol, director, International Energy Agency, Paris, France

“The current decline in global emissions is not a development we should be happy about,” said Fatih Birol, the director of the International Energy Agency in Paris. “This is happening because of a major economic meltdown, and not as a result of well-designed energy policies.”

Related: UN asylum case opens door protections for climate refugees

The economic meltdown could undermine renewable energy transition, Birol said. Investments for renewable energy transition are threatened by a global recession and sourcing materials for the renewable energy industry are also under threat. About 70% of solar panels are manufactured in China, Birol said. China is also a major source of batteries for electric vehicles.

Despite the bleak picture, Birol does see a possible climate solution amid the pandemic crisis — through economic stimulus packages. The United States and the European Central Bank are planning packages worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

Birol said he is asking governments to include large-scale renewable energy investments in those packages.

“This is a very important opportunity,” Birol said. “It’s very important that we launch sustainable stimulus packages, focused on clean energy technologies.”

The levels of global and local coordination needed to avert COVID-19 devastation are familiar to those standing at the frontlines of climate change for decades.

The current upheaval and rapid response have inspired ideas for similar mobilization for the climate.


“We’re seeing profound changes in habits and behaviors, the mobilizing of massive resources and a level of global coordination that we haven't seen before. ... This is highly relevant to climate action.”Otto Scharmer, lecturer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

“With the coronavirus, we have a focusing of global attention on one single topic that really rarely happens,” said Otto Scharmer, a lecturer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and founder of the Presencing Institute, which focuses on societal change. “Once you have that focused attention. Almost anything is possible."

“We’re seeing profound changes in habits and behaviors, the mobilizing of massive resources and a level of global coordination that we haven't seen before,” Scharmer said. “This is highly relevant to climate action.”

The coronavirus is also shedding light on the vast inequalities in global health systems, Scharmer said, which is also true of climate change.

Ultimately, he says, the coronavirus crisis forces everyone in the world to reevaluate their values and consider the ways that society could look different — which could be a boon for large-scale climate action.

“The crisis allows us to reimagine not only our personal lives but really our civilization,” Scharmer said. “Our economy, our democracy and our learning systems. Those are the conversations I think we should be having now. ... That re-imagining could put us into place to really take action around climate,” he said, “and addressing some of the deeper root issues, instead of reacting to the symptoms."

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International Criminal Court says Pompeo threatened staff

Diplomats and international officials are expressing outrage after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo threatened members of the International Criminal Court prosecutor’s staff members by name. It’s the latest development in a long dispute between the US and the ICC over an investigation of war crimes in Afghanistan that may implicate American members of the military and the CIA