Coronavirus Has Transformed the Climate Movement Into Something New

Activists are scrambling to deal with the pandemic while trying to make sure no one forgets about global warming.

By Mike Pearl 07 April 2020
This article originally appeared on VICE US.

Normally, Vishal Chauhan, a 30-year-old in London, would be spending his days organizing and protesting for the radical climate direct action movement Extinction Rebellion (XR), famous for its public spectacles—things like shutting down major streets and blasting the UK Treasury with a fake blood firehose. “I’m in Extinction Rebellion because I think we need a regenerative culture. We need a culture which helps human beings achieve our potential as connected, compassionate, kind beings,” he told me.

But thanks to COVID-19, Chauhan is stuck in his flat in Tottenham, one of the poorest areas of London. Like other climate activists around the world, he's suddenly limited in what he can do for the cause. In some ways, he says, the pandemic is “a blessing in disguise.” He’s used to people saying XR wants to change things too much, or too quickly. “What we're seeing here with the COVID health crisis is how quickly we can transform any part of the way in which we live our lives when we see the threat coming,” he said.

But Chauhan knows all too well how grave the threat of this virus is, because he’s a doctor who used to work in an Accident & Emergency (A&E) department, the British equivalent of an ER. About a year ago, in response to the climate crisis, he bailed on practicing medicine to dedicate himself to activism full-time. In response to this fresh crisis, he is now trying to return to his old job. “I’m starting to get my study books out to go back because…” he told me, pausing, seemingly in search of an explanation, but no explanation seemed necessary. “Yeah, I gotta go back,” he said.

The pandemic has brought the entire world economy to a screeching halt, as states and cities have instituted unprecedented lockdown orders. It's also presented a challenge for activists like Chauhan, who felt that they were finally making progress in the fight against climate change. Just as they were getting the world's attention, they have once again lost it. The question is, can they get it back when this is all over?

“Clearly, like every other human enterprise, the climate movement has had to slow and adjust to the virus,” veteran climate activist Bill McKibben said. “There was a ton of momentum, especially in the fight against financial institutions, and some of that has been lost.” Over the past few years, the European Investment Bank has announced an end to loans for oil company projects, and New York City and oil-rich Norway have divested from fossil fuel investments. Recently, investors in Barclay’s Bank—a huge investor in European fossil fuel projects—began pushing the company to follow suit, and activists are demanding that BlackRock, the world's largest asset management company, cut back on fossil fuel investments.

Before the pandemic, there was evidence of a new public focus on climate change. In the early days of the Trump administration, sometime between the publication of David Wallace-Wells’ heart-stopping, viral New York Magazine article “The Uninhabitable Earth” and the IPCC’s pessimistic 2018 report on the vanishing likelihood of our species meeting the targets necessary to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees, something seemed to snap in people’s brains. In 2019 the urgency of acting on climate change truly broke through the noise and became the media phenomenon activists had long hoped it would become. Much of humanity responded to the flurry of haunting news stories and scientific reports with despair, but some were moved to thundering rage. It may not have been enough, but it was, at long last, progress.

Margaret Klein Salamon, co-founder of the organization The Climate Mobilization and one of the leaders of the high-profile movement to persuade political leaders to declare climate emergencies, has a book coming out called Facing the Climate Emergency: How to Transform Yourself,and it has an auspicious release date: the day before the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. That April 22 event is now likely to be muted. “The plans going into [Earth Day] were absolutely huge: three days of huge strikes led by youth. I was so excited. I think this was going to be the biggest moment for the climate emergency movement,” she told me. “Instead, it's all going to be virtual. It's going to be a livestream.”

What can the climate movement really accomplish from home? And when this is all over, will it be able to return to its full strength?

A MAN STANDS UNDER A GRETA THUNBERG MURAL IN ROME. THE QUOTE READS, "YOU'RE NEVER TOO YOUNG TO SAVE THE WORLD." PHOTO BY ANDREAS SOLARO/AFP VIA GETTY

“We have actually achieved many things,” Greta Thunberg told a small group of fellow activists in a livestreamed video chat in late March. “Maybe not what we wanted, but at least we have done something, and sometimes you just need to allow yourself to be—I dunno, proud? Or something like that.” One of the activists in the group felt it might be helpful to recount past successes, but Thunberg didn’t seem at ease in self-care mode. Her overall message was that in this moment, climate activists need to do what they always do: “Listen to the science.” During this crisis, that means social distancing, while keeping in mind, as she noted toward the beginning of the conversation, “the climate crisis is not going away.”

But much of the movement’s progress in fighting the fossil fuel industry might go away—and soon. According to the Sunrise Movement's political and legislative coordinator Lauren Maunus—who said on the Hill’s morning show-style livestream Rising that the 2020 election was “the last, best chance” for he U.S. to meaningfully fight climate change—the fossil fuel industry and its lobbyists are up their usual tricks. “Employing kind of disaster capitalism, pitting us against each other, using government as a force for bad,” was how she described it.

In the interest of speeding up the return of revenues lost due to the crisis, China’s ministry of the environment has in many cases abandoned inspections of potentially polluting factories. On March 26, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced that it would not enforce any regulations, as long as violations can be connected to the COVID-19 crisis, a decision that followed a massive lobbying effort from oil companies. A similar lobbying effort aimed at restoring the reputation of petroleum-based single-use plastic bags appears to be working. A federal bailout for U.S. fossil fuel companies hasn’t materialized but one is thought to be likely.

Perhaps the most vivid example of all is the effort in Canada to jumpstart construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, as announced by Alberta Premier Jason Kenney on March 31. “To make sure it gets done,” Kenney tweeted, “Alberta is putting our money where our mouth is—with a $1.5 billion equity stake, and a $6 billion loan guarantee backstop. Construction begins immediately—starting tomorrow.” The move came two days after restrictions on gatherings of Alberta residents were tightened from 50 people down to 15—a totally understandable safety measure amid the pandemic that will also guarantee that no effective protest can be legally mounted against the new construction project as it charges ahead.

Montana-based indigenous activist Kandi White, the climate campaign coordinator for the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN), doesn't plan to just sit around while such pipeline projects move forward. “Everyone’s busier now than we were before, because it's almost like our hands are tied,” she said. “The IEN has been fighting the Keystone XL pipeline, and now they're trying to build it, and try to push it through because we're under this mandate to not be out doing activism.” Protesters can’t employ what is self-evidently their most effective strategy—showing up at construction sites and protesting—but, she said “We have been doing webinars, and we have been doing online platform work to get information out to our people.”

EXTINCTION REBELLION MEMBERS IN BERLIN DELIVERING FOOD TO THE NEEDY. PHOTO BY FABIAN SOMMER/PICTURE ALLIANCE VIA GETTY

At the same time, climate activists—who often tend to be more science-focused than the general population—are concerned about telling people about the dangers of COVID-19 and helping out with the more pressing crisis now facing the world.

“I have uncles, cousins, and brothers that work in the [oil] industry, which is also why I know how bad it is—how many spills go unreported, how people are getting sick—and it’s the same with this crisis. Getting the information to the people in a way that they understand, so that they have a trustworthy source, has been very difficult,” White said. It’s a role made all the more difficult, she explained, by the three tribal nationalities sharing land on her reservation—Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara. “My sister, and people that I know are still going to work, they're still going to the office. They're still going into the tribal building,” she said. “It's like they're not even taking it as seriously as I feel it should be taken.”

But the ways in which the pandemic dovetails with the climate crisis can also be seen as an advantage, according to McKibben. The similarities, he hopes, will bring the climate crisis to life for people who couldn’t previously wrap their heads around it. “We see what Trump's failure to 'flatten the curve' means for the virus; our failure, 30 years ago, to start flattening the carbon curve leaves us in much the same place," he said. "Now we have to work harder and faster, and there will still be huge damage.”

Until the quarantines are lifted and protesters can once again take to the streets, the climate movement can probably coast on momentum to some degree—scoring up a number of wins and PR victories that were long in the works. A federal judge’s ruling effectively rescinded permits for the Dakota Access pipeline on March 25. Marie Newman, a Sunrise-backed candidate, defeated Illinois Democratic Representative Dan Lipinski, one of Congress's most conservative Democrats, in the state’s primary on March 18. With Earth Day coming, the issue of climate change graces the current covers of Rolling Stone, National Geographic and Fortune magazines, even as the pandemic grips the world.

Moreover, terms like “Green New Deal” have recently transformed into everyday inside-the-beltway vernacular, to the point where President Trump referred to some mild pro-environmental policies in the House bailout bill as “green new deal stuff,” and blamed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for their inclusion. (Pelosi once dismissively referred to the Green New Deal as “the green dream or whatever they call it.”) Amid a growing chorus of calls for a New Deal-sized public works project to help Americans out of the current economic crisis, this sort of confusion could redound to the benefit of the climate movement.

For Maunus and the rest of the Sunrise Movement, which made a name for itself by protesting inside Pelosi’s office in favor of the Green New Deal in 2018, “this is really a moment of unprecedented opportunity for change.” That doesn’t just mean legislation—projects in the works at Sunrise include “free painting of, Green New Deal signs, motor processions, and six-feet group protests,” Maunus said.

In light of the political and economic instability this crisis has brought to light, some activists would rather just toss out the present governmental and economic systems altogether. “A lot of the old-school anarchist people have been dreaming of this kind of anarcho-federalist model,” Chauhan told me. “Going to small communities, or like having assemblies like the Rojava model, where decision-making is devolved to the most local level possible, and people feel empowered because they're making decisions.”

In fact, he told me his Tottenham flat is meant to be his organizing base of operations, “because I thought if there was gonna be a revolution it would be here. Or maybe not revolution, but social upheaval, disenfranchisement of the poor and minority groups, and so I wanted to be organizing here. Meanwhile a lot of my mates all left. So the house I am in usually has eight people in it, only two people are left ‘cause everyone else went back to smaller towns or the countryside to be safer.”

No large-scale uprising has occurred, to be sure, but according to Chauhan, wherever local activists in the UK have begun operating in earnest, XR members—known internally as rebels—are participating as needed, a part of the organizational theory of mutual aid. “In the UK, 3,500 local mutual aidgroups have been set up in the space of three weeks. Fucking amazing! Huge! Nothing to do with XR, but a lot of XR rebels are doing it.” The purpose, he said, is simply, “planting the seeds in those spaces, or making the right interventions.”

Across all the activist organizations I spoke to, the theme of gardening in quarantine appeared again and again. “I’ve been telling folks it's a really good time to get your seeds going and get your gardens going. Spring is coming. My crocuses have bloomed,” White said. “The fact that the whole entire world is waking up to indigenous knowledge now is great, but it's not new. If you go stand on the grass without your socks and shoes on, or if you're in a forest next to a tree, you actually start to feel better.”

“People are so disconnected from these very basic concepts, and that is capitalism,” she continued. “That is colonization—to get your mind off of very basic and true concepts of our relationship with and our connection to the land.”

Mike Pearl is the author of The Day It Finally Happens: Alien Contact, Dinosaur Parks, Immortal Humans—and Other Possible Phenomena. Follow him on Twitter.

Young climate activists slowed by pandemic, but not defeated

By MARTHA IRVINE and CHRISTINA LARSON April 19, 2020

1 of 17
FILE - In this Monday, Oct. 29, 2018 file photo, Jamie Margolin, a high school student, speaks during a rally by youth activists and others in Seattle in support of a high-profile climate change lawsuit in federal court in Eugene, Ore. "It's really hard to grow up on a planet full of ifs," said Margolin, a 17-year-old cofounder of This is Zero Hour. "There's always been a sense that everything beautiful in this world is temporary for my generation." (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson)

Jamie Margolin had not expected to be sitting in her bedroom right now.

The high school senior had prom and graduation coming up, but so much more: A multi-state bus campaign with fellow climate activists. A tour for her new book. Attendance at one of the massive marches that had been planned this week for the 50th anniversary of Earth Day.

Then the pandemic arrived in Seattle, her hometown, and her plans went out the window.

“But still so much to do,” Margolin said, perched in front of her computer for a video interview from that bedroom.

Like many other young activists who’ve helped galvanize what’s become a global climate movement, Margolin is not letting a spreading virus stop her. They are organizing in place, from the United States to Ecuador, Uganda, India and beyond.

And while some fear they’ve lost some momentum in the pandemic, they are determined to keep pushing — and for now, to use technology to their advantage.

Unable to gather en masse as they’d planned this Earth Day, these activists are planning livestreams and webinars to keep the issue of climate front and center on the world stage and in the U.S. presidential race.

One event, Earth Day Live, is being organized by a coalition of youth-led climate groups, including Zero Hour, of which Margolin is a leader (her Twitter profile includes the tag #futurepotus). As is the case with many other young climate activists, she got involved in the movement taking aim at the fossil fuel industry well before Sweden’s Greta Thunberg became a global household name.

Online organizing is not as easy in some countries. In Uganda, activist Mulindwa Moses says only about a third of the population has Wi-Fi. Also under lockdown, the 23-year-old graduate student is waiting for his chance to return to planting trees and speaking to his nation’s youth in person.

Like the original founders of Earth Day, he is among those who were first inspired by local issues — which they came to connect with global climate change.

While traveling in eastern Uganda, Moses met with families who had lost their homes in mudslides caused by torrential rainfall.

“I remember a girl I had a conversation with — she lost her parents and had to take care of her siblings. She was suffering so much,” he said.

So, last year, he began a campaign to encourage citizens to plant “two trees a week” and regrow their forests to combat deforestation and mudslides exacerbated by changing weather patterns.

In Ecuador, 18-year-old Helena Gualinga also has had to pause her world travels.

Born in Ecuador’s indigenous Kichwa-speaking Sarayaku community — home to about 1,200 people in the Amazon — she says she learned from the example of her parents and her elders how to speak up for the rights of her people. Their fight has been against a government that they believe has given their land too freely to mining and oil companies.

“The energy I remember from my elders growing up” — at community meetings she attended with her parents when she was small — “was that my community was always very worried,” she said.

Full Coverage: Climate change

Now, she added, “I know I have a voice.”

Moses plans to run for his country’s parliament next year. “I want to fight to change the system from the inside,” he said.

So does Max Prestigiacomo, a freshman at the University of Wisconsin, who is set to take his seat on the city council of Madison, Wisconsin. While fighting the coronavirus has used up much of local government’s bandwidth, he still plans this fall to push the platform on which he ran – for his city to become fully sustainable by 2030. It is a lofty and some would say unattainable goal, but he is looking for “the impossible yes.”

“Obviously, I wanted the alarm sounded decades ago before I was even born,” the 18-year-old said. “But it’s too late for incremental change.”

Tia Nelson, daughter of the late Sen. Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, founder of Earth Day, said her father would appreciate the determination of this generation, as he did the young people who made the first Earth Day in 1970 a great success.

Though the senator went to Washington in 1963, and won support from President Kennedy, his daughter said it took several years to find backing for many of his environmental causes. He came up with the idea of Earth Day, first envisioned as a nationwide “teach-in,” after reading a magazine article about college students’ impact on U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

Later that same year, the Environmental Protection Agency was born.

“The climate youth movement today is having a significant and important impact in doing exactly what my father had hoped on the first Earth Day — that he would get a public demonstration sufficiently robust to shake the political establishment out of their lethargy,” Tia Nelson said. “The youth movement 50 years ago did that. The youth movement today around climate change is doing the same thing.”

Nelson, who is climate director at the Wisconsin-based Outrider Foundation, said she’s particularly excited at polls showing that many young Republicans care just as much about climate change as Democrats.

Peter Nicholson, who helps lead Foresight Prep, a summer environmental justice program at Chicago’s Loyola University, said the coronavirus crisis only highlights the message that “we are all connected.”

“Climate change is no less real,” he said. “The feedback loop is just much longer.”

So for now, Margolin and her peers will use their devices to help foster those connections — something their predecessors could not do remotely.

“Everyone is online anyway,” she said. “Maybe they start on Earth Day. But then with online resources, you click one link that leads you to another, leads to another that leads you to contact info.”

“And then you just start getting involved.”

____

Other online Earth Day resources:

Smithsonian Earth Summit: https://earthoptimism.si.edu/2020-summit/

Earth Day 50: http://www.earthdayinitiative.org/

Earth Day for Earthrise: https://earthrise2020.org/

Citizens Climate Lobby virtual Earth Day: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/uniting-from-home-registration-101119077884

___

Martha Irvine is an AP national writer and visual journalist. Christina Larson is an AP global science and environment writer.

Climate activist Jamie Margolin poses for a portrait in a tree in Seattle on April 5, 2020. Margolin, who is finishing her senior year of high school, first took on the issue of climate in 2014, when she was just 14 years old. Two years later, she helped found Zero Hour, a youth-led organization aimed at pushing climate as a political and social justice issue. The group is helping take the climate movement online in the age of coronavirus. “We’re doing webinars, we’re doing livestreams, we’re doing social media content, animations, everything like that to educate folks,” she said. “We’re doing everything we can.” (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)

In this Friday, Feb 21, 2020, photo, environmental activist Licypriya Kangujam, 8, stands at Juhu beach in front of a pile of trash during a cleaning drive in Mumbai, India. Kangujam is among the younger climate activists in the world and, beginning two years ago at age 6, began taking on issues ranging from carbon emissions in her home country to ocean pollution. Insistent that children deserve to be heard on these topics, she’s given a TED Talk and attended the United Nations Climate Change Conference. “I’m strong. I’m brave. I’m intelligent,” she said. “(Addressing) climate change is not only for adults, or just for our leaders.” (AP Photo/Rajanish Kakade)

In this Friday, Feb 21, 2020, photo, environmental activist Licypriya Kangujam, 8, holds a sign at Juhu beach during a cleaning drive in Mumbai, India. Kangujam is among the younger climate activists in the world and, beginning two years ago at age 6, began taking on issues ranging from carbon emissions in her home country to ocean pollution. Insistent that children deserve to be heard on these topics, she’s given a TED Talk and attended the United Nations Climate Change Conference. “I’m strong. I’m brave. I’m intelligent,” she said. “(Addressing) climate change is not only for adults, or just for our leaders.” (AP Photo/Rajanish Kakade)

FILE - In this Feb. 5, 2020 file photo, climate activist Luisa Neubauer speaks at a demonstration outside the Olympic Hall during the ongoing Siemens annual shareholders' meeting in Munich, Germany. Protesters outside the venue demonstrated against the company's decision to stand by a contract linked to a coal mine in Australia. Sign in the foreground reads "Australia burns" in German. The 23-year old, based in Berlin, and others started the “Fridays for Future” climate protests in Germany after “we as one of the richest economies worldwide were intending to miss our climate targets due to a lack of political will,” she said. “That to me seemed rather unacceptable.” She said decision-makers and all generations need to work together on common-sense solutions. (Peter Kneffel/dpa via AP)

In this Aug. 10, 2019 photo provided by Sebulime Enock, Mulindwa Moses, 23, poses for a portrait in Kampala, Uganda. Moses, a graduate student, has begun a campaign to encourage citizens to plant trees to help prevent deadly mudslides in his country. Before the coronavirus shut down Uganda, he regularly met with adults and schoolchildren to educate them about the impacts of climate change and deforestation. He said he has received death threats because of his work. “I’m not going to stop. If it’s losing my life, I think I’ll die a great man,” said Moses, who plans to run for parliament in 2021. (Sebulime Enock/Blu Monkey Studios via AP)

In this Jan. 13, 2020 photo provided by Sebulime Enock, Mulindwa Moses prepares tree saplings for planting in Naayla, Uganda. Moses, a graduate student, has begun a campaign to encourage citizens to plant trees to help prevent deadly mudslides in his country. Before the coronavirus shut down Uganda, he regularly met with adults and schoolchildren to educate them about the impacts of climate change and deforestation. He said he has received death threats because of his work. “I’m not going to stop. If it’s losing my life, I think I’ll die a great man,” said Moses, who plans to run for parliament in 2021. (Sebulime Enock/Blu Monkey Studios via AP)

In this March 8, 2020 photo provided by Lucas Bustamante, Helena Gualinga marches in the International Women's March in Quito, Ecuador. Gualinga, who is 18, is part of the country's indigenous Kichwa-speaking Sarayaku community – home to about 1,200 people in the Amazon. “My community had to defend its right to the land,” she says. Following the example other mother and her elders, she says she learned how to be a spokesperson for the rights of her people. She speaks often about the negative impact of climate change, oil drilling and mining on the Amazon rainforest. She does not consider herself an activist. “I just care about the environment." Gualinga has split her time between Ecuador and Scandanavia, where her father grew up. (Lucas Bustamante via AP)

This 1968 photo provided by the family shows Tia Nelson and her father, U.S. Sen. Gaylord Nelson, on the campaign trail in Wisconsin. Of her father, the late Sen. Gaylord Nelson, founder of Earth Day, Tia says her father would appreciate the determination of this generation, as he did the young people who made the first Earth Day in 1970 a great success five decades earlier. (Nelson Family via AP)

Tia Nelson, daughter of Earth Day founder, the late U.S. Sen. Gaylord Nelson, looks at photos from her father's archive on Monday, March 2, 2020, in Madison, Wis.. Tia, who has dedicated her own career to environmental work, is a managing director at the Madison-based Outrider Foundation, a nonprofit that works on climate and other issues. Nelson, who was 13 when the first Earth Day happened, says she is heartened by a new generation of young climate activists who've taken up the cause. (AP Photo/Martha Irvine)

THIRD WORLD USA 
11,000 deaths: Ravaged nursing homes plead for more testing

BERNARD CONDON, MATT SEDENSKY AND JIM MUSTIAN
1 of 12In this Friday, April 17, 2020, photo, Dr. Gabrielle Beger, left, prepares to take a nose-swab sample from Lawrence McGee, as she works with a team of University of Washington medical providers conducting testing for the new coronavirus at Queen Anne Healthcare, a skilled nursing and rehabilitation facility in Seattle. Sending "drop teams" from University of Washington Medicine to conduct universal testing at skilled nursing facilities in collaboration with public health officials is one aspect of the region's approach to controlling the spread of the coronavirus. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)


NEW YORK (AP) — After two months and more than 11,000 deaths that have made the nation’s nursing homes some of the most terrifying places to be during the coronavirus crisis, most of them still don’t have access to enough tests to help control outbreaks among their frail, elderly residents.

Neither the federal government nor the leader in nursing home deaths, New York, has mandated testing for all residents and staff. An industry group says only about a third of the 15,000 nursing homes in the U.S. have ready access to tests that can help isolate the sick and stop the spread. And homes that do manage to get a hold of tests often rely on luck and contacts.


“It just shows that the longer that states lapse in universal testing of all residents and staff, we’re going to see these kinds of stories for a very long time,” said Brian Lee of the advocacy group Families for Better Care. “Once it’s in, there’s no stopping it and by the time you’re aware with testing, too many people have it. And bodies keep piling up.”
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That became clear in some of the nation’s biggest nursing home outbreaks. After a home in Brooklyn reported 55 coronavirus deaths last week, its CEO acknowledged it was based entirely on symptoms and educated guesses the dead had COVID-19 because they were unable to actually test any of the residents or staff.





At a nursing home in suburban Richmond, Virginia, that has so far seen 49 deaths, the medical director said testing of all residents was delayed nearly two weeks because of a shortage of testing supplies and bureaucratic requirements. By the time they did, the spread was out of control, with 92 residents positive.

Mark Parkinson, CEO of the American Health Care Association, which represents long-term care facilities, says “only a very small percentage” of residents and staff have been tested because the federal and state governments have not made nursing homes the top priority.


“We feel like we’ve been ignored,” Parkinson said. “Certainly now that the emphasis has gone away from hospitals to where the real battle is taking place in nursing homes, we should be at a priority level one.”

Two-thirds of U.S. nursing homes still don’t have “easy access to test kits” and are struggling to obtain sufficient resources, said Chris Laxton, executive director of The Society for Post-Acute and Long-Term Care Medicine.

“Those nursing home leaders who have developed good relationships with their local hospitals and health departments seem to have better luck,” said Laxton, whose organization represents more than 50,000 long-term care professionals. “Those that are not at the table must fend for themselves.”


Public health officials have long argued that current measures like temperature checks aren’t sufficient. They can’t stop workers with the virus who aren’t showing signs from walking in the front door, and they don’t catch such asymptomatic carriers among residents either. What is needed is rigorous and frequent testing — “sentinel surveillance,” White House virus chief Deborah Birx calls it — to find these hidden carriers, isolate them and stop the spread.

The U.S. is currently testing roughly 150,000 people daily, for a total of 4.5 million results reported, according to data compiled by the COVID Tracking Project. Public health experts say that needs to be much higher. “We need likely millions of tests a day,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute.

The federal Health & Human Services Department told The Associated Press that ”there are plenty of tests and capability for all” priority categories and that all should be tested. The agency also noted one of President Donald Trump’s briefings this week in which he underscored the states’ role in coordinating testing.

Only one governor, West Virginia’s Jim Justice, appears to be mandating testing for all nursing homes without conditions. Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan ordered tests at all 26 nursing in the city, using new kits that can spew out results in 15 minutes. Massachusetts abruptly halted a program to send test kits directly to nursing homes this week after 4,000 of them turned out to be faulty. New Hampshire teamed with an urgent-care company to test care workers. Several states including Colorado, Florida, Maryland, Tennessee and Wisconsin have dispatched National Guard testing strike teams.

“It’s a snapshot,” New Hampshire Health Care Association President Brendan Williams said of the national piecemeal approach. “We need a motion picture.”

While the federal government promised this week to start tracking and publicly releasing nursing home infections and deaths, which could help identify hotspots, that work was only beginning. In the meantime, The AP’s own tally from state health departments and media reports put the count at 11,260 deaths from outbreaks in nursing homes and long-term care facilities nationwide. About a third of those are in New York.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who has described COVID-19 in nursing homes as “fire through dry grass,” said he would ideally like to see any resident, staffer or visitor seeking to enter a nursing home take a rapid test that would come back in 20 minutes. But, he said, “that’s millions of tests.”

Dr. Roy Goldberg, medical director of a nursing home in the Bronx that reported 45 deaths, said his facility still can’t test asymptomatic patients because of shortages that have limited testing to those showing fever or a cough.
Full Coverage: Virus Outbreak

“This isn’t what anyone signed up for,” Goldberg said. “It just breaks my heart that the long-term care industry is going to end up being totally scapegoated on this.”

Amid the tragedies have emerged hopeful cases in which early and aggressive testing has made huge difference.

After the first of two deaths at a Sheboygan, Wisconsin, nursing home and other residents and staffers started falling ill, administrator Colinda Nappa got on the phone and pleaded with state officials: “I got to know what is going on.”


A 65-member National Guard testing unit soon showed up, donned head-to-toe protective suits and quickly tested nearly 100 residents and 150 staffers.

In all, 19 residents and staffers tested positive and all are either now housed in a special section of the building or quarantined at home. There have been no more deaths.

In the Seattle area, which had the nation’s first major nursing home outbreak that eventually claimed 43 lives, health officials are targeting their testing efforts on homes that have shown little sign of the disease.


Their plans for testing at 19 such facilities are aimed at trying to head off hotspots by quickly identifying and containing cases. In conjunction with ramped-up capacity for tracing contacts of patients, it’s considered an important prerequisite to reopening he economy.

This past week, medical professionals led by the University of Washington’s Dr. Thuan Ong went room by room through a nursing home in a highly orchestrated ballet of swabbing and bagging. In all, 115 residents were tested and results came back the next day as all negative — a development that drew cheers from the facility’s staff.

“One of the greatest values,” Ong said, “is to catch it before it spreads.”

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AP investigative news researcher Randy Herschaft in New York contributed to this report, along with photographer Ted Warren and reporter Gene Johnson in Seattle, reporters Candice Choi and Jennifer Peltz in New York, and Holly Ramer in Concord, New Hampshire. Sedensky reported from Philadelphia.

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Read AP’s ongoing coverage of how COVID-19 is impacting nursing homes and the elderly in the U.S.:

— Nursing home outbreaks lay bare chronic industry problems

— Nursing home infections, deaths surge amid lockdown measures

— Nursing home deaths soar past 3,600 in alarming surge

— Deaths hit 45 at Virginia care home called ‘virus’s dream’

— Feds under pressure to publicly track nursing home outbreaks

— ’Under siege’: Overwhelmed Brooklyn care home tolls 55 dead




AP

Sizing up Trump’s green-card halt: Is it just temporary?
By ELLIOT SPAGAT APRIL 23, 2020

FILE - In this April 22, 2020, file photo, a man wearing a face mask is reflected in the door of a business closed due to the COVID-19 outbreak in San Antonio. President Donald Trump has hinted that he might extend a 60-day hold on green cards that he has ordered to protect American jobs during the coronavirus pandemic. (AP Photo/Eric Gay, File)

SAN DIEGO (AP) — Pamela Austin, a recruiter at Adventist Health Bakersfield in California, made seven job offers to foreign nurses in February and just finished a first round of interviews with 12 more candidates. They are from all over the world, including the United Kingdom, the Philippines, Australia and Malaysia.

The international candidates fill the private hospital’s critical need for experienced nurses who can work in emergency rooms and intensive care units, Austin said — jobs that can’t be met alone with U.S. nurses, many of whom are recent graduates.

That need could go unfilled, however, if President Donald Trump extends a 60-day hold on green cards he ordered in the name of protecting American jobs amid the coronavirus outbreak.

“It would be a huge setback,” Austin said. “Those are holes I don’t have people to fill.”

Trump says the measure is necessary at a time when unemployment has climbed to levels last seen during the Great Depression.

Critics have dismissed the move as the president’s veiled attempt to achieve cuts to legal immigration that he previously suggested but couldn’t persuade Congress or the courts to accept — and to distract voters from his handling of the pandemic.

But immigrant advocates and political opponents are not the only ones who oppose the measure: Hardliners from Trump’s base say it doesn’t go far enough to limit immigration.

The order “is designed to satisfy powerful business interests that value a steady flow of cheap foreign labor,” Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, wrote in a letter to the president Thursday.

The Center for Immigration Studies, another hardline group, said the 60-day pause “will provide little relief to Americans” and criticized an exemption for foreigners who agree to invest at least $900,000 in the U.S.

The proclamation, signed Wednesday, halts temporary nonimmigrant visas for hundreds of thousands of workers a year, including farm workers, software engineers and others in fields deemed to have labor shortages. It doesn’t apply to green-card applicants already in the United States.

Many families will be barred from immigrating as long as the freeze lasts. Spouses of U.S. citizens and their children under 21 are exempt, but parents, adult children, grandchildren, adult siblings and other relatives aren’t.


Carl Shusterman, a Los Angeles immigration attorney who advises hospitals, said he had hoped Trump’s proclamation would provide a blanket exemption for nurses, who often arrive on green cards. Instead, it only exempts health care workers whose work is deemed essential to recovering from the COVID-19 outbreak.

“Embassies and consulates make the decisions,” he said. “They don’t have any special expertise in COVID-19, like none of us do.”

Houston immigration attorney Raed Gonzalez said he doesn’t expect the suspension to have much of an effect — at least in the short term — because embassies and consulates had already halted routine visa processing last month in response to the pandemic.

“This is more of a show from the administration than anything else,” he said.

But other immigrant advocates predict profound changes if the measure becomes permanent.

Doug Rand, co-founder of Boundless, a company that advises families and individuals on green cards, estimates 358,000 applicants a year would be unable to get permanent residency if the order were extended.

He said the casualties would include roughly 50,000 diversity visas each year for countries that send fewer people to the U.S., and that the measure would have a big impact on immigrants from Asia, Central America and eastern Europe.

Rand says Trump is using the pandemic to achieve changes to the immigration system that he couldn’t get past Congress or the courts. He called the 60-day halt a “double fig leaf” to make the measure more palatable.

“I don’t think it takes much guesswork that President Donald Trump is going to use his discretion to extend it 60 days from now and again and again and again,” Rand said.

The edict has similarities to legislation Trump tried unsuccessfully to pass in 2017 that would slash legal immigration, largely through family-based visas that the president has referred to derisively as “chain migration.”

Last month, the administration effectively suspended asylum by rapidly expelling anyone who enters the country along borders with Mexico and Canada. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this week extended the policy through May 20 on public health grounds.

Trump told reporters that he may extend the most recent order or modify it next week, in two months or “as we go along” to be “made tougher or made less tough.”

“We don’t want to hurt our businesses, and we don’t want to hurt our farmers,” he said Wednesday. “Very important.”

Joe Biden, Trump’s presumed Democratic rival in November’s election, echoed those who called the measure an attempt to divert attention from the president’s handling of the pandemic.

“Rather than execute a swift and aggressive effort to ramp up testing, Donald Trump is tweeting incendiary rhetoric about immigrants in the hopes that he can distract everyone from the core truth: He’s moved too slowly to contain this virus, and we are all paying the price for it,” Biden said Tuesday.

Matt Hill, a campaign spokesman, said Thursday that Biden would not maintain the policy if elected.

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Associated Press reporter Nomaan Merchant in Houston contributed to this report.

CRIMES OF PREACHERS.

In the year 1906 the Young Men’s Christian Association of Pittsburgh, in Pennsylvania, rejected the application of an actor for membership on the ground that one of his profession could not be a moral person. Viewing the action as a slur cast on the whole theatrical profession, Mr. Henry E. Dixey, the well-known actor, offered to give one thousand dollars to charity if it could be shown that actors, man for man, were not as good as ministers of the gospel. No champion of the cloth appearing to claim Mr. Dixey’s money on that proposition, he went further and offered another thousand dollars if there could not be found a minister in jail for every state in the Union. This second challenge was likewise ignored by the clergy and the association which had provoked it, but Mr. Dixey made a few inquiries as to the proportion of ministers to actors among convicts. His research, which was far short of being thorough, discovered 43 ministers and 19 actors in jail. The investigation, so far as the ministers were concerned, could have touched only the fringe of the matter, for in eight months of the year 1914 the publishers of this work counted more than seventy reported offenses of preachers for which they were or deserved to be imprisoned, and of course the count included only those cases reported in newspapers that reached the office through an agency which scans only the more important ones. There had been nothing like a systematic reading of the press of the [6]country for these cases. Judged by 1914, the clerical convicts in 1906 must have far exceeded the number developed by Mr. Dixey’s census.

The foregoing incident is introduced here to explain the nature of this work, “Crimes of Preachers,” which, like Mr. Dixey’s challenge to the clergy in behalf of his profession, is the reply we have to make to the preachers in behalf of the unbelievers in their religion.
The clergy assume to be the teachers and guardians of morality, and assert not only that belief in their astonishing creeds is necessary to an upright life, but, by implication, that a profession of faith is in a sense a guarantee of morality. It has become traditional with them to assume that the non-Christian man is an immoral man; that the sincere believer is the exemplar of the higher life, while the “Infidel,” the unbeliever, illustrates the opposite; and that whatever of morality the civilized world enjoys today it owes to the profession and practice of Christianity

Virus misinformation flourishes in online protest groups
By AMANDA SEITZ April 21, 2020

A woman holds a sign as she attends a rally outside the Missouri Capitol to protests stay-at-home orders put into place due to the COVID-19 outbreak Tuesday, April 21, 2020, in Jefferson City, Mo. Several hundred people attended the rally to protest the restrictions and urge the reopening of businesses closed in an effort to slow the spread of the coronavirus . (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson)

CHICAGO (AP) — Hundreds, sometimes thousands, of posts fly in the new Facebook groups daily.

The coronavirus numbers are fake, some of the social media videos claim. “Social distancing is the new way to control you, your family and your behavior,” another commenter warns. Others say the pandemic is an overblown hoax.

The loose network of Facebook groups spurring protests of stay-at-home orders across the country have fast become a hotbed of misinformation, conspiracy theories and skepticism around the coronavirus pandemic. Launched in recent weeks by pro-gun advocacy groups and conservative activists, the pages are repositories of Americans’ suspicion and anxiety — often fueled by notions floated by television personalities or President Donald Trump himself and amplified by social media accounts.


In a matter of days, the Facebook pages have mobilized protests at state capitols and collectively gained an audience of nearly 1 million followers on Facebook, according to The Associated Press’ analysis of the groups.

There’s little basis in reality for many of the claims on the sites. The coronavirus has infected millions of people worldwide, and the U.S. has recorded more deaths — 43,000 — than anywhere else in the world, according to a Johns Hopkins University count. Stay-at-home orders have been used by governments across the world — and the political spectrum — to try to contain the spread, as recommended by the world’s top health officials.

But the power of suspicion is apparent in the Facebook groups. A private group was key in enlisting people for a “Liberate Minnesota” march outside Democratic Gov. Tim Walz’s home Friday, despite his order limiting large gatherings. Trump backed the protesters on Twitter, calling to “LIBERATE MINNESOTA” right before the protest kicked off.

“We recruited some trusted friends, threw it up on Facebook Sunday night,” said conservative activist Michele Even, who oversees two Facebook groups in Wisconsin and Minnesota with a collective following of 100,000. “By Friday, we had over a thousand shares for the event.”

Under pressure after a spate of nationwide protests organized on its site, Facebook said Monday that it would ban events that don’t follow social distancing rules.


“Events that defy government’s guidance on social distancing aren’t allowed on Facebook,” the company said in a brief statement that did not explain how it would evaluate whether the events violate local ordinances. Facebook said it removed postings for events in California, New Jersey and Nebraska.

Users on the platform are still promoting future stay-at-home protests in Wisconsin, Virginia and Illinois. One Facebook ad calls for people to “descend on the Capitol building and surrounding streets, either on foot or in vehicles,” this Saturday in Denver. Some Facebook users are promoting a “drive-in” protest called Operation Gridlock to clog roads surrounding state capitols.

The movement is also becoming increasingly partisan online, with prominent conservatives urging their followers to protest Democratic governors, despite stay-at-home orders coming down in nearly every state, including some led by Republican governors.

“Every patriot should go outside, socially distanced and with masks, and protest these Democrat tyrants,” Charlie Kirk wrote last Friday to his 1.7 million Twitter followers.

Twitter users are also pushing YouTube video links that describe the coronavirus as a hoax or promoting farflung theories that it was created in a lab, using the hashtags ReOpen or Gridlock, said Kathleen Carley, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University’s CyLab Security and Privacy Institute. Trump has also floated the idea that the virus is man-made.

Nearly identical claims are also being posted across multiple platforms — from Twitter to Reddit to the Facebook groups — suggesting that the misinformation is orchestrated on some level, she added.

“There are some people in these groups that have legitimate concerns about the economy, but they’re being overwhelmed,” Carley said. “There’s a lot of these conspiracy theories, linked right into these reopen groups.”

At least some of those Facebook groups are part of a coordinated campaign.

Facebook groups in Ohio, Wisconsin, Minnesota, New York and Pennsylvania were launched by Ben Dorr and his brothers, who run pro-gun groups in several Midwestern states. The brothers have also registered several websites under the “Reopen” name that directs users to their pro-gun lobbying group and invites them to “donate” to the cause.

The Dorr brothers have spent years raising money off conservative causes like anti-abortion rights or gun rights, said Kurt Daudt, Minnesota’s Republican House minority leader. Daudt believes it’s a scam — saying he once watched them take a video outside the statehouse, claiming they were headed inside to lobby, but they left immediately after filming wrapped.

“They really try to take advantage of whatever issue people are passionate about at any given time and try to raise money for themselves,” Daudt said.

Dorr contends his Facebook groups are part of a “grassroots” movement to protest stay-at-home orders.

“We want to reopen these states, save these peoples livelihoods,” Dorr said in a phone interview with the AP.

He wouldn’t say precisely how many pages or websites he and his brothers operate. Calls to brothers Chris and Aaron Dorr were not returned.

Their Facebook groups are peppered with posts that predict the government will force people to get coronavirus vaccinations and videos that say health officials are intentionally inflating coronavirus death numbers.

Even, who helps run the Facebook groups in Minnesota and Wisconsin with the Dorrs, said she believes many people are unintentionally sharing misinformation on the pages.

“A lot of times people are posting because they’re not aware it is fake or false information,” she said.

But that false information could be driving some people to protest the stay-at-home orders, said Nir Hauser, the chief technology officer at VineSight, a company that tracks misinformation.

Hauser identified news articles of protesters who cited popular coronavirus conspiracy theories in interviews. One woman told a North Carolina TV station that “nobody is sick with COVID.”

“The stuff that we’re seeing online does eventually percolate to real people,” Hauser said. “It got them to leave the house, go out and protest.”

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Associated Press writer David Klepper contributed to this report from Providence, R.I.

‘Republicans are nervous’: Some in GOP eye protests warily

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In this April 15, 2020, photo, Steve Polet holds a sign during a protest at the State Capitol in Lansing, Mich. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya)

APRIL 23, 2020

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — The latest demonstration by right-wing groups against measures to contain the coronavirus will be held Friday in Wisconsin, where hundreds, and possibly thousands of people plan to descend on the state Capitol to protest the Democratic governor’s stay-home ordinance.

It’s expected to be among the biggest of the protests that have popped up around the U.S. in recent days. But as with some earlier events, one group will be noticeably absent: the state’s most prominent Republicans.

That includes Sen. Ron Johnson, a Trump ally, who says he’ll be sheltering in place at his home in Oshkosh about 90 miles from Madison.


“I’m neither encouraging nor discouraging them,” said Johnson, 65, whose career was launched by the tea party movement, a protest effort with ties to the current one. He urged anyone who decides to attend the protest to practice good personal hygiene and social distancing.

Johnson’s distance and ambivalence is shared by many Republicans as they warily watch the protests — with their images of gun-toting activists, the occasional Confederate flag, and protesters wearing Trump hats but no face masks. Six months away from an election, the protests are forcing some Republicans to reckon with a restless right flank advocating an unpopular opinion even as the party seeks to make gains with moderates, women and suburban voters.

Polls show the sentiment behind these groups is currently unpopular. A survey by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found only 12% of Americans say the measures in place where they live to prevent the spread of the coronavirus go too far, though Republicans are roughly four times as likely as Democrats to say so — 22% to 5%. The majority of Americans — 61% — feel the steps taken by government officials in their area are about right.

Still, a network of conservative groups has activated to support the efforts — seizing on the anxiety and distrust that comes with a moment of turmoil. Conservative groups with national networks, including FreedomWorks and Tea Party Patriots, have pushed the “reopen” message on social media.

Friday’s rally was promoted by Thomas Leager, a prominent Wisconsin gun-rights advocate. Those who are members of the Facebook group for the event or have advocated for rallying to reopen the state include Matt Batzel, the executive director of the Wisconsin chapter for American Majority, a group that helps conservative candidates get elected; Christian Gomez, research project manager at the John Birch Society; and Stephen Moore, a fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation.


“The polls are very clear. That’s why I think Republicans are nervous about this,” said Moore, who is on Trump’s economic task force and has promoted some of the protests provided attendees should follow social distancing guidelines. “But these things can change. That’s the point of these protests — to change public opinion.”

The many unknowns of pandemic — including what the death toll might be if restrictions like stay-home orders are lifted — complicate the political calculations. And Trump himself has positioned himself on both sides of the divide in this party. After issuing guidelines for states to reopen, he tweeted support for protesters who were violating them, calling on them to “LIBERATE” three states with Democratic governors. He empathized with protesters, saying they have “cabin fever” and “want their lives back,” then criticized Georgia’s governor for reopening his state too early.

That’s left most Republicans — particularly those in tough re-election fights this fall — playing it safe by staying away from protests or from being overly vocal about reopening things.

In North Carolina, Sen. Thom Tillis, who is among the GOP senators whose elections could determine if the party keeps control of the Senate, has been repeatedly complimentary in public of Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper and his decisions.

“We need to let people know that now is not the time to let their guard down,” Tillis said on Thursday during a coronavirus conference call with constituents. He said he thinks one or two other states talking about reopening are “doing just a little bit too soon based on the data and the presidential guidelines.”

“People need to wear a mask, they need to avoid going out if they don’t need to,” Tillis said. “That’s the only way that we are ultimately going to be beat this virus and get our economy back on sound footing.”

For some Republican candidates and elected officials the protests have been a way to get attention from a vocal faction of the party. said Wisconsin-based pollster Charles Franklin.

In Minnesota, former GOP congressman and Senate candidate Jason Lewis made a protest outside the governor’s mansion one of the first stops on an RV tour of the state where he’s pushing for an end to the shutdowns. Lewis said he’s skeptical of the polling on the question, noting people are honking in support and giving thumbs up as his RV passes by, particularly in smaller towns where people feel like the restrictions are unfair and killing their businesses and livelihood.

“People are saying ‘Finally someone is saying what I feel,’” he said, predicting the shutdowns will be “the defining issue” in his race against Sen. Tina Smith.

In Maine, where moderate Republican Sen. Susan Collins is up for reelection, rural residents were behind a protest Monday in the capital city of Augusta. The event divided GOP contenders in a congressional primary: One Republican, Eric Brakey, joined the protesters, while one of his opponents skipped the event but called on others to join her in a “virtual” protest using social media.

Republican Adrienne Bennett said it’s important to be “safe and responsible.” Collins did not respond to request for comment about the protest.

Wisconsin Republicans were initially generally supportive of Democratic Gov. Tony Evers approach to fighting coronavirus, but they broke last week when he extended a stay-at-home order for another month until May 26, which was the latest in the Midwest and one of the latest in the country. This week Republican legislative leaders asked the Wisconsin Supreme Court to block the order and force the state Department of Health Services to work with them on a new approach to reopening the state.

“There’s a lot of frustration out there,” said Republican state Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, among those filed the lawsuit against Evers. “The fact that Governor Evers’ voicemail is full and people aren’t getting a reply to their emails makes people feel like they’re not being heard.”

Vos, who made headlines for declaring Wisconsin polling places safe for voters while covered in protective gear, would not say whether he will attend Friday’s rally. His counterpart in filing the lawsuit, and candidate for Congress, state Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald did not respond to requests for comment.

One of the rally’s organizers, Madison Elmer, said they were approached by at least one office holder who wanted to speak but organizers turned them down. Elmer would not identify the person. Instead, the rally will feature speeches from business owners, farmers, a doctor and a nurse.

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Burnett reported from Chicago. Associated Press reporters David Sharp in Portland, Maine and Gary Robertson in Raleigh, North Carolina contributed.

THIRD WORLD USA
AP review: State supply stocks sparse and dated before virus

By DAVID A. LIEB and CUNEYT DIL

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FILE - In this April 10, 2020, file photo, wearing protective masks ground crew at the Los Angeles International airport unload supplies of medical personal protective equipment from a China Southern Cargo plane. Before the coronavirus outbreak, many states had only a modest supply of medical equipment. An Associated Press review of more than 20 states found that many were still storing items that were left over from an influenza pandemic a decade ago and long since expired. (AP Photo/Richard Vogel, File)

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo (AP) — Last autumn, when schools were in session, sports stadiums full and no one had even heard of the COVID-19 disease, the Missouri health department made an eerily foreshadowing request.

It asked the state for $300,000 to buy supplies in case of a large-scale disease outbreak. The goal was to fill a gap between local and federal sources.

Today, as states spend billions of dollars in the fight against the coronavirus, that October funding request appears woefully insufficient. Yet it highlights a stark fact: States were not stocked for a pandemic and have been scrambling to catch up.

An Associated Press review of more than 20 states found that before the coronavirus outbreak many had at least a modest supply of N95 masks, gowns, gloves and other medical equipment. But those were often well past their expiration dates — left over from the H1N1 influenza outbreak a decade ago.

The supply shortage stemmed from a variety of factors — a decline in public health funding, a cost-saving dependence on having inventory on hand only for immediate use and a belief that the federal government could come to the rescue with its Strategic National Stockpile.

In hindsight, the federal stockpile proved insufficient for a nationwide viral outbreak, and a worldwide competition for scarce supplies revealed the folly of counting on rapid deliveries.

“You could see it in almost every state, in every locality, and the federal government level: depleting the resources, depleting the inventory, and hoping when you need them they will be available,” said Gerard Anderson, a health policy professor at Johns Hopkins University, which has tracked coronarivus cases and deaths across the world.

The crisis spawned a political blame game over the shortage of protective gear for medical workers and the hunt for ventilators. Some governors harangued the federal government for leaving them in the lurch. President Donald Trump faulted states, tweeting earlier this month: “The complainers should have been stocked up and ready long before this crisis hit.”

Before the World Health Organization issued a Jan. 9 advisory about the coronavirus emerging in China, Missouri had a supply of 663,920 N95 respirator masks, 253,800 surgical masks, 154,000 gloves, 17,424 face shields and 14,048 gowns. All were leftovers provided by the Centers for Disease Control after the H1N1 flu pandemic of 2009-2010, and well beyond their shelf life.

Other states also were relying on old supplies. Officials in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Vermont, Washington and West Virginia all told the AP their stashes included at least some leftovers from the H1N1 flu.

Some old N95 masks no longer sealed properly on people’s faces or had elastic bands that disintegrated. But a CDC study found that many expired masks still could work, and states distributed them to hospitals and clinics.

Missouri, like some other states, had spent nothing to replenish the expired equipment. And even when asking for $300,000 last October, the state Department of Health and Senior Services stressed it wasn’t to build a big reserve.

“Since outbreaks and the resources needed are not predictable, purchasing a large stock of supplies that could expire or become obsolete is not a responsible use of state funds,” the health agency said in a budget document submitted to Gov. Mike Parson and state lawmakers.

That funding request for the fiscal year that starts in July still was pending in the state House when Missouri’s first coronavirus case was confirmed last month. Since then, Missouri has ordered about $40 million of protective medical supplies for health care workers and emergency responders.

Missouri Health Director Randall Williams told the AP that it didn’t make sense to load up on supplies without knowing what might be needed. For example, he said, bug spray would have been more useful than face masks during the 2015-2016 epidemic of the Zika virus, which is spread by mosquitoes.

“If you spend money on prevention and whatever comes your way isn’t that, then you have less money for response” when an emergency occurs, Williams said.

Federal public health funding for states has been on a downward slide since new programs were launched after the 2001 terrorist attacks and anthrax scare. The Public Health Emergency Preparedness program provided $675 million last year — down 28% since 2003, according to the nonprofit Trust for America’s Health. The Hospital Preparedness Program provided $265 million last year — down by almost half during that same period.

Colorado used to have two medical stockpiles. But the state received minimal federal funding for storing supplies from the H1N1 pandemic and none to buy more. The stockpile in Denver was dissolved last fall and its remnants transferred to one in Grand Junction. Those supplies had all been distributed by the beginning of March, as the coranavirus was spreading.

Ohio, like many states, began storing some supplies after the 2001 terrorist attacks. But its financial commitment waned after each crisis was averted, said Deborah Arms, president of the Ohio Nurses Association, who led the state health department’s prevention division from the late 1990s to 2008.

“It’s always difficult for public health in these kinds of disasters to be able to advocate for continual funding ... for something that might take 10 years to see a result,” she said.

Michigan, which has the third-highest coronavirus death toll among U.S. states, had 53,500 gloves left over from past epidemics, 5,120 N95 masks, 5,000 surgical masks and just 500 face shields among its pre-coronavirus supplies.

The state could not afford to replace expired items or the warehouse fees for storing more, said Michigan Department of Health and Human Services spokeswoman Lynn Sutfin.

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said the state had counted on the federal government to be prepared for a pandemic.

“No one could have said that they would come in and build a state stockpile. That’s never been the role and the assumption,” she said. “Yet if I could turn back the clock, that’s precisely what we would have started doing.”

Contrary to Trump’s assertion that states bore the primary responsibility for stockpiling medical supplies, many states had depended on the federal government to store provisions in case of emergencies.

New Hampshire’s emergency operations plans call for maintaining a small supply reserve, but then “very much relying on the national stockpile for anything more than, say a week,” said state Health and Human Services Commissioner Lori Shibinette.

Virginia Secretary of Finance Aubrey Layne said he had viewed stockpiling supplies as a federal responsibility.

“Are we probably going to start stockpiling stuff now?” Layne asked. “The answer is yes.”

Even before the latest crisis, some experts had urged stocking up as a way to lessen the disruption to supply chains and avoid having to compete with other governments for scarce equipment. A June 2009 report published in the CDC’s journal Emerging Infectious Diseases recommended a “stratified purchase plan” — buying essential items periodically as money became available.

“Supplies need to be ordered far in advance of a pandemic to avoid major problems with back orders and supply shortfalls,” the report concluded.

Instead, public health offices, hospitals and clinics have largely been ordering supplies as they are needed. But just-in-time buying doesn’t work when supply chains collapse and every state and country competes in world markets.

“We’ve short-shrifted our public health structure, because we don’t need it until it happens. But then it’s too late to build it when there’s a pandemic,” said California state Sen. Richard Pan, a pediatrician.

Sean Dunn, an Ohio lobbyist who has represented hospitals, product distributors and a health care services company, said government and health officials need to rethink their approach.

“The notion of having to keep stores of anything, until a couple of weeks ago, was an old-fashioned notion,” Dunn said. “This is going to change our mindset.”

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Dil reported from Sacramento, California.

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Julie Carr Smyth in Columbus, Ohio; Alan Suderman in Richmond, Virginia; James Anderson in Denver; David Eggert in Lansing, Michigan; and Holly Ramer in Concord, New Hampshire, contributed.

Staff count emotional cost as virus savages UK nursing homes

By JO KEARNEY and JILL LAWLESS

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In this April 20, 2020, photo, nurses guide a resident at Wren Hall nursing home in the central England village of Selston. The coronavirus pandemic is taking a huge emotional and physical toll on staff in Britain’s nursing homes, who often feel like they're toiling on a forgotten front line. The virus is sweeping like a scythe through Britain’s 20,000 care homes and has left thousands of elderly people sick and dead. (AP Photo/Frank Augstein)

SELSTON, England (AP) — Lucy Dawson is haunted by a sense of powerlessness.

The nurse has equipment to treat the residents of the nursing home where she works when they become sick with the coronavirus — but it doesn’t seem to make any difference.

“We’ve got fluids, or we’ve got oxygen on the go. You know, you name it, we’ve got it,” said the nurse at Wren Hall, a small home for elderly people with dementia in the central England village of Selston.

But still, “it’s bereavement after bereavement,” said Dawson, who has worked at the home for two decades. “We’re losing people that we’ve loved and looked after for years.”


The coronavirus pandemic is taking a huge emotional and physical toll on staff in Britain’s nursing homes, who often feel like they’re toiling on a forgotten front line.

The virus is sweeping like a scythe through Britain’s 20,000 care homes and has left thousands of elderly people sick and dead. At Wren Hall, 12 of 54 residents died in three weeks after contracting COVID-19.

“To be putting your heart and soul into nursing somebody to sustain life, it’s just a massive devastation when ...,” Dawson trailed off. “I’ve just got no words.”

It’s a tragedy being repeated across the U.K. and around the world. While the coronavirus causes mild to moderate symptoms in most who contract it, it can result in severe illness in some, especially older people.

Britain’s official tally of almost 19,000 coronavirus-related deaths — including at least 15 nursing home workers — counts only those who died in hospitals. Official statistics show over 1,000 more virus-related deaths in homes in England and Wales up to April 10. In Scotland, which keeps separate records, a third of virus deaths have been in homes for the elderly. It is likely that all of these counts are underestimates. The World Health Organization says up to half of COVID-19 deaths in Europe may be in nursing homes.

Each death is felt painfully at Wren Hall, a homey, close-knit place bedecked with cheerful signs — “Happiness is not a destination, it is a way of life” — where many residents and staff have lived for years.

“There’s some people in this building who I see more than my actual family,” said nursing associate Damian Mann, who has worked at the home for 11 years.

He said the outbreak had left him feeling “helpless.”


“You start to question yourself, I think, as a professional,” he said. “You come in every day and someone is dying every day that you’re here. It’s not normal for that to happen ... in this setting. So we look back and we think, is there anything we could have done?”

That frustration is compounded by physical barriers — masks, gloves and plastic aprons — and by the need to keep families away from sick relatives.

In such extreme circumstances, even a kind act can elicit pain. Care assistant Pat Cornell made cards with residents’ photos to send to family members unable to visit in person.

“The sad part is, I sent one on Friday, and the lady died on the Saturday,” Cornell said. She’s haunted by the thought that the bereaved family will be upset all over again when they get the card.

The emotional strain is intensified by a feeling among many staff — often poorly paid — that they have been overlooked. When the government offered health care workers tests for the virus, nursing home staff were not included. Homes for the elderly were also low down the pecking order for personal protective equipment, as authorities scrambled to meet the demand from hospitals.

“It was like we were the forgotten people, the people in the care homes and the staff in the care homes,” said Sally Bentley, who has worked at Wren Hall for nine years. “Like we’re expendable, really, I suppose.”

Wren Hall’s owner-manager, Anita Astle, went on TV earlier this month in desperation, seeking more protective gear. She found that suppliers had hiked their prices as much as sixfold.

Since then, the home has received donations from local people and businesses, but Astle says some items, especially gowns, are still scarce.

She said the role nursing homes are playing in the pandemic has not been fully recognized.

“People with and without COVID-19 are being discharged from hospitals to care homes to free up (hospital) beds,” she said. “We are being asked to do things in care homes that we’ve never been asked to do before, (like) verification of death.”

The British government, stung by criticism of its handling of the outbreak, has announced that nursing home staff, along with health care workers, can now be tested for the virus at drive-thru centers and mobile sites. But Astle says so far she has not managed to get anyone tested — even though more than half of Wren Hall’s 142 staff have showed symptoms at some point.

For now, the staff are coping as best they can. They are encouraged that some residents who have been sick in the home’s “red zone” are recovering and leaving isolation.

“We’ve all cried,” Cornell said. “We’ve all had — even though we shouldn’t — we’ve all had hugs, we’ve all talked about it to each other.”

But Mann worries about the lingering toll.

“The impact that it’s having on the team, even though they’re soldiering on through,” he said, “The long-term effects of it are going to be massive.”

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Lawless reported from London.

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Follow AP coverage of the virus outbreak at https://apnews.com/VirusOutbreak and https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak

Coronavirus shakes the conceit of ‘American exceptionalism’

By CALVIN WOODWARD



WASHINGTON (AP) — What if the real “invisible enemy” is the enemy from within — America’s very institutions?

When the coronavirus pandemic came from distant lands to the United States, it was met with cascading failures and incompetencies by a system that exists to prepare, protect, prevent and cut citizens a check in a national crisis.

The molecular menace posed by the new coronavirus has shaken the conceit of “American exceptionalism” like nothing big enough to see with your own eyes.

A nation with unmatched power, brazen ambition and aspirations through the arc of history to be humanity’s “shining city upon a hill” cannot come up with enough simple cotton swabs despite the wartime manufacturing and supply powers assumed by President Donald Trump.

The crisis turned doctors in the iconic American shining city, New York, into beggars with hands outstretched for ponchos because they couldn’t get proper medical gowns. “Rain ponchos!” laments tech entrepreneur Marc Andreessen. “In 2020! In America!”

It’s turned a Massachusetts hospital executive into an under-the-radar road warrior, working up a deal through a friend of a friend of an employee who heard about a warehouse more than five hours away with masks. Two tractor-trailers disguised as grocery trucks picked them up, dodged interference from Homeland Security and took separate routes back in case one load got intercepted on highways through the northeast “pandemic alley.”

“Did I foresee, as a health-system leader working in a rich, highly developed country with state-of-the-art science and technology and incredible talent, that my organization would ever be faced with such a set of circumstances?” asked Dr. Andrew W. Artenstein of Baystate Health, who was on hand at the warehouse to help score the booty. “Of course not.”

But, he said, “the cavalry does not appear to be coming.”

At the time of greatest need, the country with the world’s most expensive health care system doesn’t want you using it if you’re sick but not sick enough or not sick the right way.

The patchwork private-public health care system consumes 17% of the economy, unparalleled globally. But it wants you to stay home with your COVID-19 unless you are among the minority at risk of death from suffocation or complications. It wants you to heal from anything you can without a doctor’s touch and put off surgeries of all kinds if they can wait.

In the pandemic’s viral madhouse, the United States possesses jewels of medical exceptionalism that have long been the envy of the world, like the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health.

But where are the results?

For effective diagnostic testing, crucial in an infectious outbreak, look abroad. To the United Arab Emirates, or Germany, or New Zealand, which jumped to test the masses before many were known to be sick.

Or to South Korean exceptionalism, tapped by Maryland’s Republican governor, Larry Hogan, who accepted a planeload of 500,000 testing kits from Seoul to make up for the U.S. shortfall. The aid was dubbed Operation Enduring Friendship and annoyed Trump, the “America First” president.

Simple gloves. Complicated ventilators. Special lab chemicals. Tests. Swabs. Masks. Gowns. Face shields. Hospital beds. Emergency payouts from the government. Benefits for idled workers. Small business relief. Each has been subject to chronic shortages, spot shortages, calcified bureaucracy or some combination.

“This monumental failure of institutional effectiveness will reverberate for the rest of the decade,” Andreessen, a tech investor best known for the Netscape browser in the 1990s, said in his company newsletter.

Yet Trump uses his daily White House briefings to claim success and talk about his poll numbers, TV ratings, favorite theories about science and the praise he gets from governors, who may be at risk of seeing their states intentionally shortchanged by Washington if they don’t say something nice about him.

“A lot of people love Trump, right?” Trump asked himself at the briefing Monday.

He then answered himself. “A lot of people love me. You see them all the time, right? I guess I’m here for a reason, you know. ... And I think we’re going to win again, I think we’re going to win in a landslide.”

Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont, a Democrat, found something nice to say about the administration this past week: It’s relaxing some regulations. “They’ve now said you can come up with your own swab,” he said. “One good thing is, the federal government is getting out of the way.”

That is one iteration of American exceptionalism now — a national government responding to a national crisis by getting out of the way.

The cavalry isn’t coming.

That’s what plunged Dr. Artenstein into his great mask caper.

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WINGING IT

If the Strategic National Stockpile has been of any benefit to Baystate Health in western Massachusetts, Artenstein, the organization’s chief physician executive, is not aware of it.

The backup emergency medical supply worked in 2015, speeding 50 doses of botulinum antitoxin to Ohio when people ate bad potatoes at a church potluck. One person died, dozens got sick, but botulism was nipped in the bud. But in today’s pandemic, the stockpile drained before the peak.

Artenstein and his team were drawn into what seemed like a zero-sum game to keep their doctors, nurses and staff protected with the most basic gear. Purchases have been known to fall apart at every stage of a transaction over the past six weeks, he said, at times because the federal government has apparently outbid his team for supplies.

So when Baystate Health learned about a large shipment of three-ply face masks and N95 respirators in the mid-Atlantic region, it was time for a road trip. Baystate Health was using up to 2,000 disposable masks a day and within several days of running out.

Two disguised trucks headed south, several members of a supply team flew down and Artenstein decided he’d best go, too, in his car. “It was felt by all that a little executive muscle might help in this situation,” he told The Associated Press, expanding on his account in The New England Journal of Medicine.

Baystate Health was paying five times the normal rate for the masks and found out that only one-quarter of the original order would be available. But the team converged at the distant warehouse and verified that the masks were good.

Then two FBI agents, on the lookout for illegal reselling, flashed their badges and began asking questions. “They were doing their job,” Artenstein said, “and that was fine with me because we were doing our job.”

But passing muster with the FBI was not the last hurdle. Homeland Security, the agents said, was considering whether masks in the shipment should be allocated elsewhere. “They had to hoist it up the chain,” he said of the agents. “The wheels turn slowly.” That took hours. “I really was nervous the whole time.”

Driving back on his own with the shipment still in limbo, Artenstein got on the phone to “try to thaw this frozen structure a little bit.” Baystate Health’s CEO contacted Rep. Richard Neal of Massachusetts, chairman of a powerful House committee, who got on the case. The shipment was eventually cleared and the trucks set off through the Northeast Corridor.

Artenstein got the call around midnight that the masks were coming off the trucks and into hospital inventory.

With that, the acute mask shortage was resolved. But when Artenstein spoke with the AP, Baystate Health was two days from running out of disposable gowns.

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PLANNING IT

Public institutions are measured by their foresight as well as by their response. Why didn’t you see this coming? they get asked when things go wrong — when terrorists strike, hurricanes flood a city, a pandemic arrives.

The United States saw this coming 15 years ago and still wasn’t prepared.

“If a pandemic strikes, our country must have a surge capacity in place that will allow us to bring a new vaccine online quickly and manufacture enough to immunize every American against the pandemic strain,” President George W. Bush said in a call for readiness in 2005.

The principal goal was “the capacity for every American to have a vaccine in the case of a pandemic, no matter what the virus is,” said Michael Leavitt, then the health and human services secretary.

Bush announced billions of dollars for a wide-ranging plan for a pandemic like this one. It accelerated a new method of vaccine research, beefed up stockpiles and steered aid to states to build mobile hospitals and more.

Many of the needs of today were anticipated in a mix of federal and state plans. Children would be schooled remotely — TV was the medium of choice then. People would need ready access to advice about whether to leave home quarantine to seek care — in Texas, the plan was to have retired doctors staff phone banks for that purpose. If 911 dispatchers got sick, librarians would step in.

Colorado parked trailers filled with medical supplies and cots in secret locations. In emergency simulations, officials in Idaho and Hawaii dispensed M&Ms for antiviral pills.

But for all the creativity and ambition, a year later almost half the states had not spent any of their own money for the preparedness subsidized by Washington, and in the years that followed — through the Great Recession, more war, more time passing — the federal effort languished, too.

“Our country has been given fair warning of this danger,” Bush said at the launch, recalling the lethal 1918 pandemic and bird flu outbreak then spreading overseas. Americans have “time to prepare.”

But foresight became a thing of the past. And to hear Trump, it’s as if it never existed.

“Unforeseen problem,” Trump says of the pandemic. “Came out of nowhere.”

“This is something,” he said, “that you can never really think is going to happen.”

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Associated Press writers Lauran Neergaard in Washington, Ted Anthony in Pittsburgh and Aya Batrawy in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, contributed to this report.