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Over 40,000 Americans have now died from the coronavirus, a sobering milestone that didn’t stop President Trump from bragging about his administration’s “perfect” response on Sunday. If there’s one thing the scared, grieving citizens of this country are aching to hear, it’s a highly edited clip of Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) saying that Trump did a good job.
- Over the weekend, Trump also lashed out at governors in both parties for complaining about testing shortfalls, lied about how rapidly testing capacity is expanding, called testing “a local thing” that the federal government shouldn’t be responsible for, and finally said he would invoke the Defense Production Act to ramp up production of nasal swabs, weeks after labs started reporting shortages. He then—again—REVERSED himself, and also hasn't addressed the shortage of reagent chemicals needed to run diagnostics, or the lack of test uniformity slowing down the process.
- Unreliable antibody tests are another problem: The FDA allowed 90 companies to sell tests without federal vetting, and many have turned out to be flawed. The existing federal guidance on the tests is also confusing, leading some health-care providers to use them incorrectly. Even if the tests do improve, they’ll be subject to the same manufacturing shortages that have prevented diagnostic testing from scaling up quickly. Widespread antibody screening is critical to reopening the country, and Trump has yet to take an interest in ensuring the supply meets the demand.
- With all of that in mind, meet Brett Giroir, Trump’s coronavirus-testing czar. Giroir was forced to resign from his work on vaccine development projects at Texas A&M University in 2015, where his performance evaluation said that he was a poor team player, and “more interested in promoting yourself” than the center where he worked. One former associate said Giroir “over-promised and under-delivered,” and had a temper.
- That makes him a natural fit for the Trump COVID-19 team, which seems to have gotten matching “over-promise and under-deliver” tattoos. Here’s the latest example: After Trump refused to reopen enrollment in the Affordable Care Act’s marketplaces, the administration pledged to cover coronavirus treatment for all uninsured Americans. Two weeks later, it hasn’t explained how or when that will happen. The White House has also not made clear how it will pay out the funding to cover coronavirus testing for the uninsured, which Congress approved a month ago.
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In other funding questions, why was Shake Shack first in line for a small business loan?
- A huge chunk of the funds from the Payroll Protection Program (PPP) went to large restaurant chains, hotels, and publicly traded corporations, over independent small businesses that are on the brink of shuttering. This happened thanks to a provision that the restaurant industry lobbied for while the CARES Act was being drafted. (Shake Shack, to its credit, said it would return the $10 million it received.) We’ve also got some queries about this map of state-by-state discrepancies in PPP loan distribution, which bears a suspicious resemblance to this one other map.
- Those funds should be replenished soon: The White House and Democrats are closing in on a deal for a $450 billion package that puts $300 billion into the PPP, and includes $75 billion for hospitals and $25 billion for testing. The bill doesn’t include more money for state and local governments, but Democrats locked in the other major provisions they demanded. It doesn’t go far enough for some House progressives—Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) said she won’t support it without more funding for states and individuals.
Some Republican governors have announced plans to reopen businesses as early as this week, acting on Trump’s insistence that it’s safe to do so, when it’s definitely not. We’re only as strong as our weakest link, and right now our weakest link is Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA), telling Georgians it’s cool to go bowling.
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Need a break from the news? Check out Hall of Shame. Hosts Rachel Bonnetta & Rachna Fruchbom relive the biggest scandals in sports history today. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to pods →
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Whole Foods has been tracking its employees with a heat map that assesses which stores are at risk of unionizing. Amazon, which owns Whole Foods, has now fired multiple employees for labor organizing. Whole Foods has fittingly taken a more holistic approach toward the same goal, using an elaborate scoring system to assign a rating to each of its 510 locations based on the likelihood that its employees might form or join a union. The metrics used to calculate a risk score include employee “loyalty” and “racial diversity,” as well as local economic and demographic factors. Labor experts say that kind of workforce analysis is something large companies have done legally for decades, and a data-powered heat map is simply the dystopian new frontier of union opposition.
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- The price of a barrel of oil has gone negative for the first time. You can’t afford not to buy several barrels of oil right now. Use them as a table! Give them as gifts! Roll one around your neighborhood while doing a Daniel Plainview impression! The world’s your oilster.
- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Benny Gantz have agreed to form a unity government, keeping Netanyahu in office as he faces corruption charges.
- A gunman in Nova Scotia has killed at least 16 people in one of Canada’s deadliest mass shootings. Reminding us all that Canada is a very different country, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has already promised to advance new gun-control legislation.
- Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) allowed Florida beaches to reopen as the state’s coronavirus cases surpassed 25,000, indicating he is unwilling to let Brian Kemp run away with the title of Biggest Dumbshit Governor without a fight.
- More than 70 percent of the inmates at one Ohio prison have tested positive for coronavirus. Ohio’s Marion Correctional Institution is now the largest known hot spot in the U.S., with at least 1,828 infections.
- RAINN’s sexual assault hotline saw a spike in calls from minors as stay-at-home orders went into effect in March. Minors made up half of the hotline’s visitors for the first time, and 79 percent of the minors discussing coronavirus-related concerns said they were living with their perpetrators.
- More than 100,000 people in Bangladesh defied a lockdown order to attend the funeral of a popular Islamic preacher. Health officials worry it will set off a surge of COVID-19 cases in a country that’s ill-equipped to manage it.
- Trump’s campaign has been secretly paying his large adult sons’ respective wife and girlfriend $180,000 per year through campaign manager Brad Parscale’s private company. That’s both too much money for them to be making, and somehow also...not nearly enough.
- Researchers at the University of Chicago found that viewership of Hannity relative to Tucker Carlson Tonight was associated with a greater number of coronavirus cases and deaths in the early weeks of the crisis. Sean Hannity has amplified Trump’s talking points throughout, assuring his viewers the virus was nothing to worry about, while Carlson was one of a few right-wing celebrities warning his audience (and Trump) that this shit was serious. That had a demonstrable impact, and a whole slew of people at Fox News should feel haunted.
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A trio of pro-gun brothers have been using Facebook to drum up anti-quarantine protests, another indication that these demonstrations are less “an organic upwelling of a broad opposition” than “carefully choreographed right-wing performance art.” Ben Dorr, the political director of a group called “Minnesota Gun Rights” (which feels the NRA is too soft on gun rights), created Facebook groups targeting Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York, along with his two brothers. The groups had over 200,000 members by Sunday, but the protests themselves have been small, which accords with the polling on opposition to stay-at-home restrictions: Nearly 70 percent of Republicans said they were in favor of a national lockdown order, along with 95 percent of Democrats. Facebook said it will remove anti-quarantine events in states where they’re prohibited by stay-at-home orders, and has so far removed protest pages in California, New Jersey, and Nebraska.
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If you're reading this right when it hits your inbox, When We All Vote is hosting a virtual couch party for voter registration and education right now—at 5:40pm PT/8:40pm ET, tune in for a live set from DJ D-Nice on Instagram Live! Listen in while helping to register voters.
British costume designers have churned out 6,500 sets of scrubs for medical workers, with the help of $62,000 in crowdfunded donations.
Health-care workers took a stand against anti-quarantine protestors in Colorado.
Hundreds of Amazon warehouse workers have pledged to call out of work in the coming days, their largest mass action since the pandemic began.
The FDA has reiterated that there’s no evidence you can get the coronavirus from food or food packaging. Keep wiping things down as an extra precaution, but breathe a little easier on that one.
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