Germany: Extremist Violence Spikes

July 10, 2020   EurActiv

By Christina Goßner

(EurActiv) — The number of extremist crimes has increased significantly over the past year. The intensity of violent crimes is increasing on both sides of the extremist spectrum. Foreign espionage activities and cyber attacks also pose an increasing threat.

These are the findings of the annual report on the protection of the constitution, which provides an overview of anti-constitutional activity in Germany. The President of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), Thomas Haldenwang, presented them on Thursday (9 July) in Berlin together with Interior Minister Horst Seehofer (CSU).

The BfV recorded just under 22,000 criminal offences committed by right-wing extremists last year, an increase of around 10% compared to the previous year. Crimes by left-wing extremists saw an increase of 40%.

“Our greatest concern is the existing propensity to violence in almost all areas of extremism,” said Haldenwang at Thursday’s press conference.

“The inhibition threshold for the use of violence is continuously decreasing,” he added. The Internet in particular is paving the way for the use of violence.

Right-wing extremism remains the “greatest threat

Both the BfV and the Interior Ministry continue to see right-wing extremism as the greatest threat to Germany.

In addition to the number of criminal offences, the membership numbers among right-wing extremist groups as well as the number of right-wing extremists willing to use violence has also risen in the past year. This comes even though the total number of right-wing extremist-motivated acts of violence fell by 15%.

The assassination of Kassel’s district president Walter Lübcke and attack in Hanau in February clearly showed a new intensity of violence in the form of targeted homicides. “This intensified violence must cause us deep concern,” said Haldenwang.

Anti-Semitism remains an important ideological element of the far-right world view. According to the report, over 94% of all anti-Semitic crimes were committed by right-wing extremists last year.

The potential number of people involved in right-wing extremist activities has risen significantly to around 32,000. In 2018, the number was around 24,000.

This sharp rise is largely due to the fact that for the first time, this group now also includes the supporters of the now officially dissolved AfD sub-organisation “The Wing.” In mid-March, the BfV classified the faction as a “proven right-wing extremist endeavour,” whereupon the AfD party leadership called for the group to dissolve itself.
Rising propensity of left-wing extremist violence

Haldenwang called the developments in the left-wing extremist spectrum “extremely worrying.” “We are seeing a significant increase in militancy and a new quality in violent crimes against people,” he said.

The BfV counts about 33,500 persons on the left-wing extremist spectrum, of whom more than 9,000 are classified as prepared to use violence.

“We are dealing with new structures,” Seehofer said. “In recent years, violent actions related to demonstrations have increasingly been replaced by planned violent actions, independent of these gathering and partly organised by small groups.”

According to Seehofer, the 40% increase in the number of violent acts committed by left-wing extremists is particularly alarming, since the inhibition threshold to commit the most serious acts is falling.
Threat from Islamist terror “very high”

Islamist terrorism also continues to pose a threat. For example, the BfV counts about 650 “threats” in Germany. According to the report, a total of about 28,000 people are part of this scene.

In this respect, Haldenwang warned that the group is “under great pressure to succeed,” especially given the defeats of the Islamic State.

In addition, the BfV identifies cyber espionage activities as a threat, with the Russian and Chinese intelligence services posing a particular danger. Attacks by foreign intelligence services in Germany are “on a high and increasingly brutal level,” Haldenwang said.

In the field of espionage, the report also mentions the murder of the Chechen-born Georgian Zelimkhan Khangoshvili in Berlin in August 2019. In June, the Federal Prosecutor’s Office had brought charges against Vadim Krasikov. On the basis of “sufficient evidence,” the authorities are treating the case as a contract killing initiated by Russian state agencies.

Nikki Haley's Astounding Claims About Iran

For U.S. officials, past and present, to be professing concern for the stewardship of the Iranian people’s public funds strains credulity.

by Alireza Ahmadi

July 11, 2020 

The specter of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) extending a loan to Iran to assist with the challenges of the coronavirus epidemic has raised objections from many U.S. officials. In an opinion article, Ambassador Nikki Haley argued that the United States should do everything in its power to block the IMF loan based on Iran’s policies in the region. Her arguments in favor of a political response to a public health emergency is typical of Trump administration officials and speak to a broader politicization with the lives of innocent people hanging in the balance. So is this an effort to block funds from an unruly actor or a cynical ploy to use the circumstances created by an epidemic for political gain as Iran has charged?

Some of Haley’s claims require addressing. First, despite her claim, the IMF is not a “subsidiary” of the UN. These organizations do not function as privately-owned corporate entities do. The IMF is an independently developed intergovernmental organization that is only part of the “UN System” because of a negotiated agreement between the two in which the IMF retains its legal independence including a separate budget, staff and decisionmaking structure. Second, the notion that they would provide a loan to Iran at the current juncture is also not an anti-American conspiracy. For decades now, the IMF has made a mission of extending financial assistance in the form of loans to countries experiencing public health crises. In this context, Iran requested a $5 billion loan from the IMF to better deal with the coronavirus crisis.

Haley’s problems with understanding the structure and roles of international organizations were readily apparent during her time in office as well as afterward. Haley uses her book, published in 2019, to make her dislike of Secretary Rex Tillerson very clear. She has a cabinet-level position and a direct line to the president. This, she feels, should mean that she is ostensibly an independent organ of the U.S. government wholly separate from the State Department—or a “free electron” as former National Security Advisor John Bolton called her. She has no interest in the State Department having any input in her staffing, policy positions, or formal statements. Her connection to Trump may be direct but it seems too irregular and unsystematic to be an effective mechanism of policy coordination between the American Embassy in Turtle Bay and the White House.

Haley twice claims that Tillerson, trying to head off her trip to International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) headquarters in Geneva, lied about having a team to look into the organization’s monitoring of the Iran deal’s implementation. She wanted to personally travel there to interrogate IAEA staff about the Iran nuclear deal that she vehemently opposed. Haley says that Tillerson told her that the trip is unnecessary as he has staff in Geneva meeting with IAEA officials on Iran related issues. She then writes that “I strongly suspected that Rex was making things up as he went along. I had heard nothing about his staff consulting with the IAEA about the Iran deal”. The State Department has an Ambassador-level Permanent Mission to the International Organizations in Vienna which includes the IAEA.

A Lesson from COVID-19: Growth is Part of the Problem | Opinion
ROBERT ENGELMAN
ON 7/10/20

Robert Engelman is a senior fellow at the Population Institute and former president of the Worldwatch Institute.

This is a good week to ponder the dynamics of human population growth, and how it relates to the coronavirus pandemic, which is surging in the U.S. and globally, driven in part by population density. World Population Day, which highlights the importance of issues like family planning for sustainable development, is this Saturday. Meanwhile, this week the U.S. Supreme Court decided that the Trump administration could let employers opt out of mandated contraceptive coverage in the Affordable Care Act.

Does the pandemic demand a rethink of our attitudes toward growth, both demographic and economic? Is perpetual growth really a guarantor of human well-being? Can we create by fiat an endless future of unlimited human numbers and activity? At what point should hubris make some concessions to humility?

"We are as gods," Stewart Brand wrote in 1968 at the opening of his Whole Earth Catalogue, "and might as well get good at it." Half a century later, we are no better at it. The more apt metaphor today might be drawn from Shakespeare's King Lear: "As flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods,/They kill us for their sport."

With new cases of COVID-19 hitting records daily in the United States, the global caseload nearing 12 million and the global death toll well above half a million, the virus is making sport of human pretensions to godlike agency, and turning up the volume on a message that until now we've consigned to the faintest of whispers: growth itself could be part of the problem.

Environmentalists understand that humanity is part of nature and not its master, but most have shied away from connecting our growing numbers and footprint to the growth of infectious diseases. Public health experts and some science journalists, however, have been ringing the alarm bell for decades.

In 1992, the Institute for Medicine published a landmark report, Emerging Diseases, which discussed how population growth, density, and distribution can facilitate the spread of infectious diseases. Laurie Garrett, author of The Coming Plague, has long warned that population expansion and density raise the statistical probability pathogens will be transmitted.

As human population grows, we intrude more into natural habitats and consume more wildlife, giving deadly viruses more opportunity to jump from animals to humans. As human-to-human transmission evolves and accelerates, and travel and trade expand, epidemics sometimes become pandemics.

The scourges of Ebola, HIV/AIDS, Zika, Lyme, West Nile, Mad Cow, SARS, and now COVID-19 came seemingly out of nowhere. But they all have deep and intricate connections to the expansion of human interaction with the natural world. Even if COVID-19 disappears quickly, other new diseases will likely wallop us with increasing frequency and force in the years ahead.

Between 1940 and 2004, as the global population soared from 2.5 billion to 6 billion, over 300 new infectious diseases emerged, and the rate of emergence increased. Those rates are likely to continue rising with population growth. Today, the global population is 7.8 billion and growing at an annual rate of about 80 million—the equivalent of adding three New York City metro areas each year. UN demographers project population will reach 10 billion by mid-century and 11 billion by 2100.

As human numbers grow, so does density. Urbanization is bringing us into closer contact with one another. Now, when social distancing is the most important bulwark against COVID-19 contagion, it's easier to see how density can cause trouble. We can't escape the confinement of our homes for the occasional foray into fresh air or friendly companionship without a raising our risk of contracting the virus. Wherever we go, there we are—in large numbers, with people masked and unmasked, coming up behind us or walking towards us, talking, coughing, and sneezing. Someone posts something about their secret, unpeopled spot in nature, and when we arrive there, hundreds of others, all potential carriers of disease, have already shown up.

If population and density growth declines, infectious diseases may follow suit. Fertility rates were already declining when the pandemic hit, but the coronavirus pandemic cuts two ways in that regard. It temporarily shut down major condom factories, disrupted contraceptive production and distribution and undermined access to safe, effective family planning services, sparking fears of a "COVID baby boom." The Trump administration's attacks on family planning could compound the problem. On the other hand, the pandemic has also prompted many to reconsider or postpone childbearing. Despite the concerns of some economists, that's a logical response and a positive development.

As a matter of human rights as well as public health, it's increasingly important for every woman to be free to make childbearing decisions herself. We need more education and autonomy for women and girls, and more innovative ways to deliver voluntary family planning services everywhere despite the pandemic.

Contrary to Steward Brand's view, we are not as gods. We are human beings, doing the best we can in an increasingly crowded and challenging world. We might as well get good at being human.

Here Are the Polls Trump Is Looking At

July 10, 2020 By Taegan Goddard 

President Trump gave some polling data to Marc Thiessen in an Oval Office interview: “President Trump was going over new polls — some internal, some not — showing him tied or leading Joe Biden in key swing states. ‘Pennsylvania tied. Florida, up one. Wisconsin, up one. Texas, up five. Arizona, Trump 49, Biden 45; North Carolina, Trump up three. And then Montana: Trump up a lot — 52-38,’ he said.”

Philip Bump: “Over and over, we’ve heard Trump wave away the idea that he’s in trouble in November, citing unspecified polls showing him doing well. And here some are — a couple without attribution and presumably internal, but a number with links helpfully included by Thiessen. The Wisconsin poll is from the Trafalgar Group; the Arizona and North Carolina ones from Gravis Marketing. The Montana poll is from the University of Montana.”

“Actual polls, allowing us at last to evaluate whether Trump is right to feel confident about November. He is not.”

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Comment

Trump Pushed To Give Intel To Russia While Staying Quiet On Taliban Arms Program

Former officials explain how Russia’s audacious bounty on U.S. soldiers may arise from Trump’s generous foreign policy.

Kremlin.ru / CC BY 4.0

Jul 8, 2020

In a July 8 report, Just Security explores the following question: “Why would the Russian government think it could get away with paying bounties to the Taliban to kill American soldiers?” Just Security concludes that Russia’s audacity may be the combined result of President Donald J. Trump’s non-action in the face of a Russian program to arm Taliban militants and his insistence that the Central Intelligence Agency provide counterterrorist intelligence to the Kremlin in spite of nonexistent returns on the cooperation.

Since February 2017, senior military officials have openly discussed “the problem of Russian provision of weapons to the Taliban.”
Former officials interviewed by Just Security emphasize that the weapons program is a far cry from the bounty program. In theory, “the Russian-Taliban arms program could also be potentially explained, or plausibly denied, by Moscow as an effort to assist the Taliban’s fight against the common enemy of ISIS.”

Nevertheless, the materials “reportedly became increasingly sophisticated,” eventually including night vision equipment that undercut America’s advantage in nighttime combat.
And in light of this growing concern, senior military officials continued discussing Russia’s weapons program in public spheres through September 2018. By then, General John Nicholson told the Voice of America that “We know that Russia is attempting to undercut our military gains and years of military progress in Afghanistan, and make partners question Afghanistan’s stability.”

However, during the same span of time Trump never brought up the issue in his own talks with Russian leaders. As late as July 2018, he “publicly side[d] with President [Vladimir] Putin over the U.S. intelligence community on the Russian interference in the 2016 presidential elections.”

In response to questions about the bounties on July 1, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo instead asserted that the administration “took… seriously” the Taliban arms program.
Just Security explains that while it can’t be ruled out that other officials such as Pompeo, may have raised the arms program with Russian leadership in private talks, “how much would that matter without President Trump’s taking action including in his public statements about Russia and engagements with Putin?”

Brett McGurk, who served as Special Presidential Envoy until December 2018, thinks that it would not have matted at all because “the Russians dismiss anything American officials say if not backed from the top.”

McGurk also asserted that both the Russian bounty and weapons programs “should have been flagged and raised in Trump’s frequent engagements with Putin. It’s even worse if Pompeo was raising the arming issue with Lavrov (as he claims) or Khalilzad with his counterpart, but Trump never raised the issue with Putin. That makes whatever Pompeo may have said irrelevant.”

In addition to Trump’s inaction on Russia’s provision of weapons to the Taliban, Just Security hypothesizes that Russia may have been further emboldened by Trump’s push for the Central Intelligence Agency to share counterterrorism intelligence with Russia’s Kremlin.
Marc Polymeropoulos, who retired in mid-2019 from the Senior Intelligence Service at the Agency, told Just Security that “There was a consistent push for CT [counterterrorism] cooperation with Moscow, coming from the White House, despite near universal belief within the IC [intelligence community] that this effort would be one sided and end up being a waste of time and energy.”
Polymeropoulos added, “To be fair, every administration wants a reset with Moscow, and thus the IC dutifully attempted to engage with the Russian government… Bottom line, we tried, as this was the guidance from policy makers. There was no ‘deep state push back,’ there was no stalling, there was a concerted effort to work with the Russians.”

Douglas London, a CIA Senior Operations Officer who retired at the end of 2018, corroborated this as the administration’s policy. He said, “despite increasing reflections of Russian material support to the Taliban raised publicly by Defense Secretary James Mattis in 2017 and throughout 2018 by General John Nicholson, President Trump pressured CIA to invest time and resources increasing counterterrorist cooperation with Russia.”

However, according to Polymeropoulous, the attempts were unproductive. Of a late 2017 trip to Moscow, he said, “it was a sisyphean task. We ended up only giving information, and not receiving anything worthwhile. I cannot think of anything of value that the Russians provided us, that saved any US lives, or was worth even the time it took to pick up the phone to set up the meetings.”

London also corroborated this, explaining that “The direction [from President Trump to share counterterrorism intelligence] came despite assessments that Russia was not being forthcoming.” London was confident that Russian counterparts used counterterrorism engagements to further counterintelligence” against the United States.

Just Security concludes that as a result of both Trump’s inaction against Russia’s Taliban arms program and his willingness to offer counterterrorism intelligence while gaining little or nothing in return, Putin’s regime in Russia felt emboldened enough to offer Taliban-linked militants paid bounties for U.S. soldiers’ deaths in Afghanistan, confident that there would be no retaliation.

Finally, Just Security asked Ambassador Todd F. Buchwald, an Ambassador for America’s Office of Global Criminal Justice who retired in 2017, what he made of Trump’s response to Russia’s arms and bounty programs.

In an email response, Buchwald chose to compare Trump’s foreign policy toward Russia with his response to recent International Criminal Court allegations against American troops.


This episode just underscores how hard it is to figure out how the Administration decides what are and what are not our urgent national priorities—the situations in which it is appropriate for the President to invoke the extraordinary authorities that Congress long ago entrusted to Presidents upon a “declaration of national emergency.” Look at the administration’s reactions to two threats: the potential for an ICC case alleging U.S. detainee abuse in Afghanistan, and Russian support for the actual slaughter of U.S. service members there.

Just three weeks ago, the President asserted his “steadfast commitment to protecting American service members and defending our national sovereignty” as his basis for his Executive Order imposing sanctions against the International Criminal Court. There are lots of different views about the Court but in fact it has never—in its history—actually convicted, or even prosecuted, the acts of a service member of the standing military of any state, much less a state as strong—and as committed to the rule of law—as the United States. Meanwhile, the Russians have—since the early days of the Administration (see here and here)—been smuggling secret weapons to our battlefield adversaries, intent on conducting actual deadly attacks on those service members; and then, following the President’s lack of objection, appear to have breathtakingly upped the ante by offering bounties for killing American troops.

It is fair to ask: which of the two—the ICC or the Russians—actually imperils our troops in Afghanistan?; and which—in the words of the President’s Executive Order—actually constitutes “an unusual and extraordinary threat” to U.S. national security?

Read more.

THIRD WORD USA

America still doesn’t have enough N95 masks

Five months into the pandemic, the Trump administration hasn’t taken charge of a supply chain that’s been stretched thin.

 Rebecca Heilweil Jul 10, 2020

A member of the medical staff listens as Montefiore Medical Center nurses call for N95 masks and other critical PPE to handle the coronavirus pandemic on April 1, 2020, in New York. Bryan R. Smith/AFP via Getty Images

In the early weeks of the pandemic, it was nearly impossible to buy N95 masks. These masks, unlike surgical masks or cloth masks, are tight-fitting and filter airborne particles that can carry the virus, making them a key source of protection for health care workers, some of whom have died after being exposed to Covid-19 at their medical facilities. Now, as the United States continues to reopen and the number cases and hospitalizations surge, that troubling shortage of personal protective equipment — and especially N95 masks — is once again a problem.

A survey from the National Nurses Union found that 85 percent of nurses reported being asked to reuse personal protective equipment that’s meant to be single-use. At one private clinic in Arizona, medical workers are treating Covid-19 patients without being given any N95 masks, according to the New York Times. The shortage is so dire that the inventor of the powerful filtration material in these masks has come out of retirement to look for ways to decontaminate his invention and make them safer for reuse.

But why is there still a shortage? Despite months of shutdown that were meant to reduce pressure on the health care system and give the US more time to prepare, production for personal protective equipment, which includes N95 masks, medical gowns, and medical gloves, never adjusted to meet the massive demand caused by the pandemic. At the same time, reopening in many states has meant that other businesses, like outpatient medical offices and construction firms, are now in search of N95 masks too. Meanwhile, the recent surge in Covid-19 cases that has followed reopening is almost certainly leading to a greater need for protective equipment in hospitals, especially in the places currently experiencing massive outbreaks, like Florida and Texas.

In early April, Donald Trump invoked the Defense Production Act (DPA), which allows the federal government to order private companies to produce needed supplies, to obtain more masks produced by 3M, one of the major American mask manufacturers. Later that month, the Department of Defense announced several other contracts for N95 masks. But as it becomes increasingly evident that these measures weren’t enough, organizations like the National Nurses United, a nationwide nurses union, and the American Medical Association have in recent weeks called for the Trump administration to use the law more aggressively to address the PPE shortage.

Earlier this week, presidential candidate Joe Biden released a supply chain plan for Covid-19 that calls for more broadly invoking the DPA, in part to deal with the ongoing shortage of N95 masks. “The Trump administration is still dragging its feet on using the DPA to produce urgently-needed supplies to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, and has fallen far short of the domestic mobilization we need,” the plan says.

“There was sometime in May where I felt like it was getting to more of a steady state,” Anne Miller, the sourcing lead for Project N95, a protective equipment clearinghouse established during the pandemic, told Recode. “The whole tenor of everything seems to be ramping back up again, and we see lots of requests for N95 respirators, isolation gowns, and surgical masks.”
A growing number of cases is increasing demand

Since states across the country have moved toward full reopening, the coronavirus crisis has arguably gotten worse than it has ever been. On July 9, the US saw nearly 60,000 new Covid-19 cases. In a majority of US states, Covid-19 cases are increasing, according to the New York Times, and outbreaks risk overwhelming some rural hospitals and smaller cities that weren’t prepared for the pandemic.

“It feels like right now we see more demand this week than we did last week, and I think we will continue to see that,” said Miller, who expects that reopening schools and universities will also cause another surge in cases, though she notes that heightened demand for N95 masks never really went away.

But national coordination of a supply chain was never set up to effectively distribute personal protective equipment and other supplies, despite calls for the federal government to step in. The National Strategic Stockpile didn’t have a large amount of backup supplies to begin with, and it wasn’t set up to respond to the full needs of a pandemic. Without leadership from the federal government — which insisted that supplies should be handled on the local and state level — governors and hospital systems have been arranging their own private purchases of personal protective equipment, often directly competing with one another. It’s an approach that Illinois Gov. J. B. Pritzker recently likened to the Hunger Games.
Opening up means more people need protective equipment

When the pandemic first started, the country’s primary concern was getting protective equipment to hospital health care workers who were treating Covid-19 patients. But as the country opens back up, people working in medical and dental offices, as well as other industries like construction, are looking for N95 masks too.

Michael Einhorn, the president of the medical supplier Dealmed, said there’s also an understandable incentive for medical facilities to buy more safety stock beyond what they need for present day-to-day operations. He points to efforts like New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s 90-Day Supply Goal as an example. That guidance urges health care facilities to have in stock enough protective equipment to last about three months.

“There are biopsies that need to take place. People need to get screened and tested. There are people out there that need treatment outside of Covid,” Einhorn told Recode. “These facilities that treat these patients don’t have access to N95s, and it’s a very big problem.”

At the end of June, the American Medical Association (AMA) sent a letter to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) emphasizing that doctor’s offices and practices outside of hospital systems were struggling to get access to personal protective equipment. James Madara, the AMA’s CEO and executive vice president, raised the alarm about “growing concern” from doctors about shortages and said that despite pleas to Congress, “a remedy remains elusive.” In fact, the problem in outpatient medical facilities was bad enough that Madara also sent a letter to Vice President Mike Pence, asking the administration to invoke the Defense Production Act.

“Without adequate PPE, physician practices may have to continue deferring care or remain closed, which will continue to have a dramatic impact on the health of their patients,” Madara wrote.

One major challenge is that many of these medical facilities don’t typically buy in bulk the way large hospital systems do and aren’t used to buying protective equipment for their daily operations. One doctor told a local paper in Pennsylvania that if his surgery center and clinic were to reach full capacity, it would only have enough PPE to last a week or two and would then have to shut down.

“If I’m a doctor, and I’m going to open my practice and … need a respirator every day, I only need a box of 20,” explains Miller, from the N95 Project. “But you can’t go out and buy a box of 20.”
The supply chain is still riddled with problems

On its own, the US simply isn’t producing enough N95 masks and other protective equipment to meet demand, despite major producers like 3M and Prestige Ameritech ramping up production. Even before the pandemic, the US relied significantly on imports, especially from China, and many point to a lack of leadership and coordination in the early months of the pandemic as a cause for the ongoing shortages.

The federal government actually turned down an early offer from Prestige Ameritech to produce millions of masks early this year, according to the Washington Post. Leading companies in the medical equipment distribution industry also told members of Congress that between January and March, the administration gave them little effective guidance, and there’s still no national coordination of a supply chain.

At the beginning of the pandemic, finding a steady and trustworthy supply of N95 masks was difficult. Hospitals ended up with counterfeit and otherwise unreliable products, while others placed orders for masks that would never arrive. There was also price gouging and hoarding, and a growing number of new, and often unreliable, suppliers attempting to take advantage of desperate buyers.

The murkiness of the supply chain has improved somewhat, though issues remain. Miller, who has kept an eye on the gray markets for protective equipment, said that many “opportunistic players have been winnowed out of the market.” The ones that remain are more reliable, and payment terms for bulk purchases have begun to return to normal. Dealmed’s Einhorn said that hospitals and buyers have become more aware of unreliable orders and the risk of counterfeit or otherwise suspicious products.

“Our government has basically said that we’re going to allow the free economy to fix the issues,” Val Griffeth, an Oregon-based doctor who co-founded a nonprofit PPE effort called Get Us PPE, told Vox last month. “Unfortunately, it takes time and capital to ramp up production, and because the government has not devoted capital to helping solve the situation, we’re seeing a delay in its resolution.”

In fact, officials don’t seem to think shortages are as significant as some medical workers have said. Vice President Mike Pence on Wednesday said that the supply of PPE is “very strong” and encouraged medical workers to re-use products.

“I’m not going to tell you we’re able to meet all demand, but there’s significantly less unfulfilled orders today than in April,” the navy official who is overseeing medical supplies distributed by the federal government, John Polowczyk, told the Washington Post in early July. “I don’t have the sense of there being severe shortages.”

It’s difficult to estimate exactly how bad the national shortage is at scale, but direct reports from medical facilities are alarming. Doctors at a medical center in Houston told the New York Times they’ve been instructed to reuse N95s for up to two weeks. A family physician in Virginia, who is on the state’s testing task force, told local news that surgical masks continue to be used unless they become dirty, and disposable gowns are also reused. In Bradenton, Florida, nurses have protested because, they say, they’re not given enough proper protective gear and aren’t updated about patients’ Covid-19 statuses.

If cases continue to surge, there’s no doubt that concerning reports like these almost certainly will, too.

Open Sourced is made possible by Omidyar Network. All Open Sourced content is editorially independent and produced by our journalists.

Housing segregation left Black Americans more vulnerable to Covid-19

Racist WWII housing policy might not sound like it has much to do with the coronavirus. But it does.

Dylan Scott@dylanlscottdylan.scott@vox.com Jul 10, 2020

Housing discrimination dating back to the 1940s put Black Americans more at risk of contracting and dying from the Covid-19 coronavirus. Here’s how. 

Matthew J. Lee/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

One thing hasn’t changed as a new surge of coronavirus cases has swelled across the United States: Black Americans continue to disproportionately get infected by and die from this novel pathogen.

The Los Angeles County health department reported this week that Black residents were dying at twice the rate its white residents were. The same is true of Black Alabamans. In Florida, Black people account for a higher share of Covid-19 hospitalizations and deaths than their share of the population.

The George Floyd protests forced a difficult conversation about the trade-offs of congregating in large groups during a pandemic and the urgency of fixing structural inequities. But more than a month later, there is little evidence the protests contributed to a significant acceleration of the coronavirus’s spread. The health consequences of US inequality, however, are still being felt by Black (and Hispanic and Native) Americans during the worst pandemic of our lifetimes.

Health disparities predate Covid-19, of course, as Jamila Taylor recently reviewed for the Century Foundation: Black Americans live shorter lives than white Americans, they have higher rates of chronic disease, they report worse mental health, they have less health care access, etc.

“Whether it’s from violence in the street or violence in the health care system, Black Americans have been dying for not just the last three months but the last three centuries,” Utibe Essien, a practicing physician who teaches at the University of Pittsburgh’s medical school, told me.

Let’s start with the obvious problem: interpersonal racism, whether tacit or explicit, directly harms Black people’s health. So does the distrust it has created between Black Americans and American institutions. This problem goes back centuries: US slaves were experimented on, and more recently, there are horrifying stories like the Tuskegee syphilis experiment. Numerous studies, some of them conducted as recently as 2016, have foundBlack people were less likely to be given pain medication in an emergency department.

And in the middle of the Covid-19 crisis, a new report found that Black people who reported Covid-like symptoms — namely, fever and cough — were less likely to be given a test for the virus compared to white people with the same symptoms. In all these ways, internalized and interpersonal racism lead to worse health outcomes for Black Americans.

But structural racism is also usually, and correctly, proposed as a critical explanation for these inequities.

After speaking last month with half a dozen Black scholars, I came to believe the best place to start in understanding how structural racism breeds racial health disparities is residential segregation. Where a person lives has direct health effects and, maybe as importantly, it will situate them for economic success or failure for the rest of their lives — which we also know is an important determinant for health.

This analysis isn’t meant to be comprehensive. That would require a whole book. But if you want to better understand how structural racism translates to the health disparities that have left Black Americans prone to Covid-19, those factors should be a good place to start.
Residential segregation is one of the primary causes of health disparities

Every scholar I spoke with included residential segregation as a primary driver of racial health disparities — taken together, they identified it as maybe the primary driver.

“I think of residential segregation by race as one of the upstream drivers,” David Williams, a professor of public health and sociology at Harvard, told me. As he wrote in a May 2020 editorial for JAMA on Covid-19 and health equity: “Social inequities are patterned by place, and opportunities to be healthy vary markedly at the neighborhood level.”

The culprit for racial housing segregation is what was called “redlining” during the mid-20th century. If you’d like to read a book about it, I would recommend Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law for the full story. But in brief, redlining meant that certain neighborhoods were given preference by the Federal Housing Administration. To receive loans to build housing developments or mortgages to buy one of those homes, real estate developers and homebuyers were directed to areas with “harmonious” racial groups (i.e. Black or white). Red lines were drawn around Black communities; white people did not get loans to build or buy houses in them, while Black people were only given loans to build or buy houses there.

And though racial discrimination is no longer enshrined in official government policy, its legacy is still felt among Black homebuyers today.

“There is a direct line from US government-led discrimination against Black people in housing — also known as redlining — to racism against Black buyers in housing in real estate today,” Belinda Archibong, an economics professor at Columbia University, told me. She cited a three-year investigation published by Newsday in late 2019 that found half of Black homebuyers on Long Island faced some kind of discrimination from real estate agents.

That helps explain why housing segregation persists. As the Economic Policy Institute reviewed earlier this year, just 13 percent of white students attend a school that has a majority of Black students, while nearly seven in 10 Black students do.

How does that discrimination affect Black people’s health? If you’re well-versed in health wonk lingo, you know the phrase “the social determinants of health.” First and foremost, those determinants reflect where a person lives. Williams, in his JAMA piece, ticked through all the ways in which the simple location of a person’s residence can affect their health:

Segregation also adversely affects health because the concentration of poverty, poor-quality housing, and neighborhood environments leads to elevated exposure to chronic and acute psychosocial (eg, loss of loved ones, unemployment, violence) and environmental stressors, such as air and water pollution. Exposure to interpersonal discrimination is also linked to chronic disease risk. Greater exposure to and clustering of stressors contributes to the earlier onset of multiple chronic conditions (eg, hypertension, heart disease, diabetes, asthma), greater severity of disease, and poorer survival for African American individuals than white persons. For example, exposure to air pollution has been linked to hypertension and asthma, as well as more severe cases of and higher death rates due to COVID-19.

During Covid, we have seen Black neighborhoods in New York City bear the brunt of infections and deaths. These disparities are even found in testing sites; News 5 in Cleveland reported this week that many chain pharmacy locations inside the city were not offering coronavirus testing, while the stores situated in the suburbs were much more likely to make tests available.

So place, determined in large part by residential segregation set in motion long ago, affects Black people’s health to this day. But its effect is more pernicious than that.
Residential segregation also helps determine economic opportunity, which strongly influences health

It’s not just how the environment affects one’s health. It’s how your place of residence affects your economic opportunities, which in turn can also have an outsized impact on a person’s health.

“Homeownership was and has been the way that Americans build wealth and are able to pass that wealth down,” Jessie Marshall, who studies health disparities at the University of Michigan’s medical school, told me. “With these government-subsidized mortgages being made available to whites and not so for Blacks, that really further set the stage for income inequality.

“As a result of that, there was continued investment into those communities that benefited from the subsidized government mortgages. The building of wealth but then also the building of public K-12 education of good quality,” Marshall continued. “In contrast to those on the other side of that red line, essentially neighborhoods of largely Black folks who did not have those same opportunities, they were not able to build or pass down wealth and were left to be in neighborhoods that were poorly funded for K-12 public education.”

The second and third-order effects have continued to ripple out over the last 75 years. As of 2018, Black Americans had accumulated just 10 cents of wealth for every dollar of wealth possessed by white Americans. In their incomes, Black Americans make just 59 cents for every dollar white Americans are paid. Research has indicated that if residential segregation were to be ended, many of those economic disparities would be dramatically reduced.

Instead, segregation preserves economic and education inequities, which in turn have perverse health effects. Returning to Williams’s JAMA op-ed, he wrote: “Segregation is a critical determinant of economic status, which is a strong predictor of variations in health.”

People who live in lower-income neighborhoods typically have more tobacco shops in their neighborhood (which drives up smoking) and they have less access to fresh food (which drives up obesity). Both smoking and obesity are precursors to the higher rates of diabetes and heart disease seen among Black Americans. As Health Affairs covered in a 2018 article, a person’s income can influence their health in disturbingly literal ways:

A robust literature links chronic stressors, including financial hardship, to deleterious genetic and hormonal changes—such as impaired DNA repair mechanisms and higher cortisol and adrenaline levels—that increase the risk of chronic disease. The negative cardiometabolic effects of poverty seem to start early and continue throughout the life course.

Something as simple as insurance coverage, which correlates to better health outcomes, follows from one’s economic well-being. The uninsured rate among white Americans is 8 percent; among Black Americans, it’s 11 percent. (It’s even higher for Hispanic Americans and Native Americans.) Black Americans are less likely to receive health insurance through their work and they are more likely to depend on Medicaid than white Americans.

Black Americans have also been disproportionately harmed by mostly southern states refusing to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. More than 2 million people have been left without any health insurance because of that policy choice, and “uninsured Blacks are more likely than Whites to fall in the coverage gap in states that have not expanded Medicaid,” according to the Kaiser Family Foundation; 15 percent of all uninsured Black Americans would qualify for Medicaid coverage if their state accepted the expansion

Race, place, income, and health, as should be obvious by now, are inextricably linked. And the health consequences of these inequities have been especially evident during the Covid-19 pandemic, as Williams covered:

Economic status matters profoundly for reducing the risk of exposure to SARS-CoV-2. Lower-income and minority workers are overrepresented among essential service workers who must work outside the home when shelter-in-place directives are given. Many must travel to work on buses and subways.

Black Americans have been squeezed from both sides by the coronavirus crisis: Many of them work in the industries enduring serious layoffs, and they are also more likely to work in jobs that are considered “essential,” which requires them to go into work and risk exposure to the coronavirus.

Either way, their health is at risk. And we are seeing the consequences in the Covid-19 death rates.

“It’s America’s institutions and laws, replicated cumulatively over time, that have led to more Black Americans being disproportionately — relative to the rest of the population — classified as essential workers,” Archibong told me, “and concentrated in low-wage service sectors that have placed them at higher risks from infection and mortality from Covid-19 today.”

The debate over reopening America’s K-12 schools, explained

Solving the school problem is crucial for parents and kids. Here’s what experts say would help.
By Anna North Jul 10, 2020, 
Freedom Preparatory Academy, an elementary school in Provo, Utah, was closed on March 16. Many cities are now grappling with whether or not to open their schools in the fall. George Frey/Getty Images

This spring, Kwesi Ablordeppey worked nights taking care of veterans at Holyoke Soldiers’ Home in Massachusetts, where at least 76 patients have died of Covid-19.

During the day, though, he has been the resident IT consultant at his home in Springfield — his two teenage daughters often needing his help troubleshooting problems with their Zoom lessons. Like most students around the country, the 10th-graders shifted to online learning earlier this year when their school closed to help slow the spread of the coronavirus.

This left Ablordeppey, a single dad, with the dual burden of working and managing his kids’ education — something many American parents have struggled with in the pandemic. “It’s not something that I’m comfortable with,” he said, but “we have to adapt to the situation.”

Adapting to any situation is easier when there’s an end in sight. But pulling sleepless nights, trying to work with kids on your lap, and sometimes even moving across the country to be with family members who can provide child care are not permanent solutions. And as Covid-19 cases skyrocket across the American South and West, and many families enter their fifth month without reliable child care in sight, the question is growing louder and louder: What’s going to happen in the fall?

It’s a question with high stakes for all involved — children, parents, teachers, and staff — a total of tens of millions of people across the country. While some have called on the federal government for help, President Trump instead waded into the fray this week with his trademark all-caps bluster to insist that schools must open in the fall without any clear solutions. He also threatened to withdraw federal funding from schools that don’t open their buildings.

But Trump’s blanket statements belie the complexity of the problem. On the one hand, it is clear that the transition to online school has led to serious setbacks in learning in the spring, especially for students who are already at a disadvantage in the school system. For example, researchers found that after the shift online, student math progress declined by about half at schools in low-income zip codes, but not at all in schools in high-income areas, according to the New York Times

.

President Trump hosted an event on July 7 with students, teachers, and administrators about how to safely reopen schools. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

And while some parents, many of them higher-earning professionals, have been able to supervise their children’s online learning while working from home, many lower-paid service workers don’t have the option to work remotely. They could soon be forced to choose between caring for their kids and getting a paycheck — if they haven’t been already. “Closing public schools on a prolonged basis poses real difficulties for low-wage workers,” Michelle Holder, an economics professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told Vox.

But at the same time, reopening schools runs the risk of exposing not just students but also teachers and staff to a highly dangerous virus. Parents, including Ablordeppey, are wary. His daughters’ district has not yet announced final plans for the fall, but his children’s safety from Covid-19 will come first in any decision he makes, especially given his experience caring for patients. “I’ve seen it with my naked eye,” he said. “When I’m looking at anything, I’m looking at that perspective.”

Many teachers are also worried about going back into the classroom without a clear plan to keep everyone safe. “Every teacher I know desperately wants to go back to work,” Sarah Mulhern Gross, a high school English teacher in New Jersey, told Vox. “We want to be with our students, just not with possible long-term effects or, God forbid, fatalities hanging over our heads.”

Despite a lack of federal direction, there are solutions: Experts have proposed a number of ways to help kids learn and parents work while mitigating the risks — from outdoor classrooms to a corps of workers who can care for children in small groups while they complete online lessons. But that will take the political will of federal and state leaders to actually confront the problem.

“The government has the capacity to do this stuff,” Lisa Levenstein, director of the women’s, gender, and sexuality studies program at UNC Greensboro, told Vox. “We’re just choosing not to.”



Online-only learning is causing real problems for kids

As the coronavirus spread around the country in March and April, schools closed in all 50 states, and most stayed closed through the end of the academic year. The closures were meant to help slow transmission of the virus, which had already sickened parents, teachers, staff, and students nationwide, though it is unclear how many infections occurred in schools.

With school buildings closed, most districts switched to delivering instruction online, a process that posed its own challenges. Experts worried, for example, about how the 17 percent of children who lack a computer at home would complete remote schoolwork, and about how homeless students — who number more than 114,000 in New York City alone — would find a place to study. And many feared that the shift to online learning would exacerbate existing racial and economic inequalities in education.

Those concerns, it turns out, were warranted. One analysis of online-learning data from this spring found that the shift could put the average student seven months behind academically, while the average Latinx student lost nine months and the average Black student lost 10, according to the New York Times.
“IF WE DON’T FIGURE OUT HOW TO DO THIS RIGHT, IN THE LONG TERM, WHAT WE’RE GOING TO BE GRAPPLING WITH IS EVEN GREATER INEQUITIES”

Students who are homeless or housing-insecure experienced especially great difficulties with remote learning, Raysa Rodriguez, associate executive director for policy and advocacy at the Citizens’ Committee for Children, a co-convener of the Family Homelessness Coalition, told Vox. New York and other cities did provide iPads and other devices to students who didn’t have computers at home, but even then, space was an issue. “You’re dealing with two or three students literally, without exaggeration, in a small room, four walls,” Rodriguez said. “Remote learning looks very challenging, to say the least.”

For all these reasons, some experts are calling for a return to in-person instruction in the fall if at all possible. The American Academy of Pediatrics, for example, stated in June that it “strongly advocates that all policy considerations for the coming school year should start with a goal of having students physically present in school.” The group noted the risks not just to students’ learning but to their overall health if in-person school cannot resume.

“Lengthy time away from school and associated interruption of supportive services often results in social isolation, making it difficult for schools to identify and address important learning deficits as well as child and adolescent physical or sexual abuse, substance use, depression, and suicidal ideation,” the AAP statement read. “This, in turn, places children and adolescents at considerable risk of morbidity and, in some cases, mortality.”

Indeed, teachers and other school staff are often the ones to spot the signs that a child is being abused at home, experts say. And when kids don’t go to school, those signs could be missed entirely. In North Texas, for example, reports of child abuse and neglect were down 43 percent after the pandemic began. It’s not an indicator there’s less abuse, “it’s an indicator of child abuse not being recognized by adults out there,” Lynn Davis, president of the Dallas Children’s Advocacy Center, told NBC.

School psychologists are worried, too, that students’ mental health could suffer with the shift to remote schooling, especially given the added stress of the pandemic. In one April survey by the Education Week Research Center, less than a quarter of school leaders said they were able to meet their students’ mental health needs to the same degree as they had before the coronavirus crisis.

While many parents remain concerned about the public health risks of returning to school amid a pandemic, without some solution to the already-evident problems of remote learning, a fall semester online could set students back further. And those who are already marginalized within the education system and society as a whole, including students of color and low-income students, are likely to suffer the most.

“If we don’t figure out how to do this right, in the long term, what we’re going to be grappling with is even greater inequities,” Rodriguez said, “even a wider gap between those who are doing well and those who are struggling every day.”
Parents are buckling under the demands of online school

Meanwhile, the shift to remote learning has placed enormous strain on parents, who have been expected to take over as part-time educators, assisting their children from home. Online learning often requires more support from adults than in-person learning, not less, as Jennifer Darling-Aduana, a soon-to-be assistant professor at Georgia State University who studies equity in digital learning, told Vox in the spring.

Young children may need constant attention from parents to keep them on task during online lessons and to help them complete assignments that could once have been done in class. And while older students may be able to complete more work on their own, they still may need help navigating new learning technology — as well as paying attention and actually getting work done when there’s no classroom to go to. For students with special needs, meanwhile, parents often must figure out how to replace the additional support, such as one-on-one aides, that schools ordinarily supply.

And a lot of that support has come from mothers, 80 percent of whom said they were shouldering the majority of homeschooling responsibilities in an April poll by Morning Consult for the New York Times.

Parents are already cutting their hours or dropping out of the labor force entirely due to child care problems — according to one survey conducted between May 10 and June 22, 13 percent of US parents had done so. And there’s evidence that mothers have been cutting back more, with 28 percent of mothers in the Morning Consult survey saying that they were working less than usual, compared with 19 percent of fathers. Meanwhile, one California mom, Drisana Rios, is suing her employer after she says she was fired because her kids made noise during work calls; experts say more cases like these are likely to follow.

These issues of work and income bring to light a function of the public school system that was often unacknowledged before the pandemic: For many families, school offers more than education — it’s “a place where parents can trust that their children will be safe,” Holder said. That’s crucial for working parents, especially those who can’t afford private child care like nannies or babysitters.

Those with the ability to work from home, especially in two-parent households, have sometimes been able to cobble together schedules that allow them to care for kids while working — often putting in hours of work late at night or early in the morning. But parents who work outside the home have been left with few options, especially if they’re raising kids on their own.

Andrea Royce (left) is homeschooling her three children together with Carlota Bernal (center) and her child during school closures due to Covid-19. Leila Navidi/Star Tribune via Getty Images

Such parents are disproportionately likely to be women of color. Over half of Black children live in single-parent homes, compared with about 20 percent of white children, Holder said. Meanwhile, single mothers are among the poorest demographic in the US, with more than a third living in poverty, she added. And Black and Latina women are overrepresented in many essential and front-line jobs that require in-person work. All of this means that the impact of school closures falls particularly hard on Black and Latina moms, who are less likely to have the work flexibility, disposable income, or help from a partner that can make pandemic child care possible, if not easy. “The problem really looks very bad for women of color who are mothers,” Holder said.

As months drag on with no child care solutions in sight for many families, “people are going to be faced with really impossible choices,” Levenstein said, like “do I leave my kids without supervision because I need to go to work and be able to buy them food?” or “do I decide I can’t go back to work?”

Ablordeppey, the Massachusetts nursing assistant, hears stories of such choices from fellow essential workers in his union, SEIU Local 888, where he is chapter president. “Some people are still at home, because they’re torn between their kids and their job,” he said.

“They ask you as an essential worker to report to work, no matter what, but they have to also know that you are a parent,” Ablordeppey said.

In-person education during a pandemic comes with real risks

And yet no matter how much students, family, and the economy may struggle under an online-only education model, there are clear public health risks to reopening schools. Coronavirus cases are rising across the country and surging disturbingly in several states, including Arizona, Texas, and Florida. And schools, at least as they’re traditionally structured, bring together hundreds of people every day, often for prolonged indoor contact with lots of talking — exactly the kind of activity that experts say is likely to spread the virus.

There is some evidence that K-12 schools may not be as dangerous for coronavirus spread as some other settings, such as restaurants and bars, because of the age of the students. While children can become severely ill from the coronavirus, they are more likely than adults to have mild cases, and some data suggests they may be less likely to become infected or transmit the virus. For example, child care centers that have remained open to care for children of essential workers have reported relatively few cases of the virus, as Dr. Sean O’Leary, a pediatric infectious disease specialist who helped write the American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines, noted in an interview with the New York Times.

However, O’Leary and others acknowledge that if schools reopen, there will likely be Covid-19 cases there. And teachers and staff, who as adults are more likely to become seriously ill than students, have voiced concerns.


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Gross, who teaches 9th- and 12th-grade English in New Jersey, created a shared document listing educators’ questions after the state announced that schools would have to offer at least some form of in-person learning in the fall. So far, more than 600 people have submitted questions, she told Vox, ranging from whether a teacher would lose sick days for self-quarantining after a Covid-19 exposure to who would pay any ongoing medical bills if a teacher did contract the disease at school.

In general, teachers “all know we work in an occupation where we’re constantly exposed to illness,” Gross said, “but for the most part that’s predictable and we know what the flu is like.” Covid-19 is something new, and the uncertainty of going back into a classroom during a pandemic gives a lot of teachers pause.

“I think a lot of teachers are leaning toward distance learning as the safest option for now,” Gross said.

Union leaders have also voiced concerns about district reopening plans, with Merrie Najimy, president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, calling Gov. Charlie Baker’s recent proposal for the state’s schools insufficient because it doesn’t place a limit on class size or require 6 feet of distance between desks. “We did not rush in opening the state economy,” Najimy said in an interview with WCVB TV Channel 5 on Sunday. “We cannot rush into opening schools just because the calendar says we have to return to school by August or September.”

Meanwhile, Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, blasted Trump’s threats to schools that don’t reopen in a Thursday interview with Today. “If too many of our members believe Donald Trump’s hyperbole instead of somebody like Andrew Cuomo’s caution about their health and safety, we’re going to have a whole lot of people retire early, quit, take a leave,” she said.

It’s not just teachers who face exposure if students come back to school buildings. As economist Emily Oster points out at Slate, it’s also staff like janitorial and cafeteria workers — groups of workers who have already faced disproportionate risks in health care settings, as they sometimes lack access to PPE.

Some have argued that working in education should be considered essential work during the pandemic, alongside jobs in health care and grocery stores. “I am an essential worker,” said Holder, who teaches college students, “and along with that come certain responsibilities and expectations.”

But essential workers in other sectors of the economy haven’t always been given the protections they’ve asked for, and many — including grocery store workers, nurses, and transit workers — have fallen ill and died. And due to looming state and local budget cuts, as well as crumbling school infrastructure, teachers are worried they won’t be protected either. “So many teachers purchase a lot of their own supplies” as it is, Gross said. “To think about going into a building with kids and staff providing a lot of their own PPE is scary.” (Some districts have already said they will provide masks for students and staff, though the price tag will be high.)

Meanwhile, many school buildings are old, with aging HVAC systems that may not meet the ventilation standards experts increasingly believe are necessary to mitigate the risk of Covid-19. “I think if teachers are essential,” Gross said, “we would agree if our schools receive the funding that actually mirrors that.”
There are solutions that would help — if policymakers listen

In an effort to balance parents’ desire for in-person instruction — and pressure from elected officials, including Trump — with the risks of crowded classrooms, many districts are proposing hybrid models of instruction. Under these models, class sizes would be smaller, allowing for some physical distancing. But students would only be physically present in school some of the time; the rest of the time, they would be learning remotely.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, for example, announced a hybrid model on Wednesday under which students would be physically in school two or three days a week. The Miami-Dade County Public School District announced on Monday that parents could choose between online-only and in-person instruction for the fall, but warned that schools might only be able to offer in-person classes part time, depending on enrollment.

While these models would allow students to get some of the benefits of classroom instruction, some of the inequities of online learning, including digital access issues, would likely remain unless specifically addressed. It’s also not clear whether many districts will offer options for child care for parents who need to work during the hours when their children are doing instruction at home. De Blasio said on Wednesday that help for parents was “something we’re going to be building as we go along.”

Beyond hybrid models, experts have proposed broader solutions to help parents and students, some complex and some simple. For many, getting kids back to school starts with controlling the virus, and actually prioritizing education in reopening plans. As epidemiologist Helen Jenkins wrote in a series of viral tweets, the key question is not how to safely reopen schools amid high viral transmission, but how to keep community transmission low enough that schools are safe. That might mean keeping other venues, like bars or restaurants, closed in order to maintain a low level of the virus in the community, as Vox’s German Lopez has reported.

“Activity in some other sectors of the economy will need to be reduced to preserve the education, feeding, socialization, and safety of our children — and the ability of parents to do their work,” Jenkins and fellow epidemiologist William Hanage wrote in a Washington Post op-ed. “Schools should be prioritized.”

Beyond keeping the virus under control, some have called for changes within schools. Outdoor classes, for example, would likely reduce transmission risk in places where weather permits. For teachers who do go back to the classroom, hazard pay would at least help compensate them for the risk they face.

“The case can be made quite easily that there are some jobs where the risk of exposure is much greater, and thus like any other risky job, such as coal mining, you take risk into account in terms of the compensation,” Holder said. “If an essential or front-line worker gets sick, they need resources to rely on if they do have to withdraw from the labor force.”

“TO THINK ABOUT GOING INTO A BUILDING WITH KIDS AND STAFF PROVIDING A LOT OF THEIR OWN PPE IS SCARY”

And while hybrid models could keep students and teachers safer by reducing class size, parents will need solutions for the hours when their kids are home. One possibility, for some, is paid leave. Under the Families First Coronavirus Response Act, parents are already entitled to up to 12 weeks of leave at partial pay if a child’s school or day care center is closed due to the virus.

However, as with other paid leave provisions in recent legislation, many employers, including those with over 500 employees, are exempt from the requirement, Pronita Gupta, director of the job quality program at the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP), told Vox. And employees have to negotiate leave with their employers, which could make it difficult for them to get the time they’re entitled to, especially if hybrid schooling in the fall necessitates a complex child care schedule.

The paid leave requirement expires on December 31, but CLASP advocates for it to be extended, as well as expanded to cover workers not currently included, Gupta said. Still, paid leave under the CARES Act “is definitely not a long-term solution for the issues around child care,” she said. “We see this as very, very much a temporary relief situation.”

Others have proposed larger-scale solutions that would help parents work even if kids don’t go back to school full time. For example, Elena Tuerk, a child psychologist at the University of Virginia, has proposed a corps of child care providers, potentially paid for by states or the federal government, who could supervise children when their parents are at work.

Such an effort could be administered through the existing AmeriCorps program, and families could apply based on their work schedules and financial needs and be matched with trained caregivers in their communities, Tuerk told Vox. Ideally, those caregivers “would see this as an opportunity to serve, which it really is,” she said.

But such a program — and indeed, all broad-based solutions to the problem of education in a pandemic — would require government investment and administration. And so far, there’s been little political will to tackle the problems that families are facing this fall. Instead, Trump, for his part, appears to be merely antagonizing school leaders, making threats about pulling funding that he may not even legally be able to fulfill.

“I think we’re sort of taking for granted that parents are going to make do the way they might have in the spring,” Tuerk said, “but the amount of disruption that is causing to people’s work lives, and in particular to women’s work lives, is not okay long term.” In addition to the economic impact, there’s also evidence that parents’ mental health is suffering — in one survey conducted between late April and early May, 46 percent of people with children under 18 said their stress level is high most days, compared with 28 percent of people without young kids. Meanwhile, 71 percent of parents said managing distance learning was a major source of stress.

Ablordeppey is intimately familiar with the anxiety of trying to raise kids during a pandemic. “You come home, you can’t even sleep,” he said, “then you have to go back to work.”

As the pandemic continues, parents like him who work outside the home need financial support to help them afford child care. “You can hire somebody to come and watch your kids,” he said, but then, “the little money that you’re making at work, you have to pay the babysitter.”

But so far, Ablordeppey has seen little leadership from politicians to address the needs of families like his. He also believes, whether online or not, schools should provide counseling to help students deal with the mental health impact of the pandemic. Instead, he said, “it’s like everybody’s on their own.”