3 Out of the 4 Major U.S. Airlines Will Require Passengers to Wear Masks on Flights

Delta Air Lines, American Airlines and United Airlines will make passengers wear face masks, establishing a new standard for the industry as it fights to win back customers during a pandemic.

The larger carriers are following JetBlue Airways, which announced April 27 that travelers would have to cover their nose and mouth throughout trips starting May 4. Delta and United start their mandate the same day, with American’s kicking in on May 11. Small children are exempt.

The requirement is meant to help soothe concerns that aircraft cabins foster the spread of Covid-19. The airlines cited guidelines from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control in implementing the change. The coverings help prevent anyone who may be unknowingly infected with the new coronavirus from spreading it in a confined space like an airplane cabin.

“We take seriously the CDC guidelines for adding this extra layer of protection,” Bill Lentsch, Delta’s chief customer experience officer, said in a statement Thursday. “We believe this change will give customers and employees some additional comfort when traveling with us.”

Southwest Airlines remains the outlier among the largest carriers. It said it will provide masks to those who want them, but hasn’t made them mandatory.

The union representing flight attendants from 20 airlines welcomed the new rule, and urged for it to be expanded.

The Association of Flight Attendants wants the federal government to mandate “masks for crew, front line employees and all passengers,” said Sara Nelson, president of the group.

Lobby, Too

Masks will be compulsory just on board American and United flights, while Delta and JetBlue are requiring them starting in the check-in lobby, gate areas, jet bridges as well as during flights. Frontier Airlines Inc., a discounter, also said it would require passengers to wear masks.

American will begin making masks and hand sanitizing wipes or gel available to some passengers on Friday, expanding to all flights as it’s able, the Fort Worth, Texas-based carrier said. Masks made at home from cloth or other household items can be used, it said.

United, Delta and American already require some employees to wear face masks, or will do so soon.

‘We Never Considered a Full Lockdown.’ South Korea’s Health Minister on the Country’s Fight Against Coronavirus

It wasn’t looking good for South Korea in mid-February. The nation had the world’s second highest number of coronavirus cases after China, owing to a cluster of infections that arose from the Shincheonji Church in the city of Daegu, some 150 miles south of the capital Seoul.

But thanks to early preparations, and a robust public health response based around extensive testing and tech-powered contact tracing, the nation’s tally of infections has been kept to just 10,765, about half directly related to Shincheonji. More impressive still, no major lockdown or restrictions on movement have been imposed, save a few scattered curfews.

On Apr. 15, some 29 million people turned up to vote in parliamentary elections—yet no known infections arose, thanks to strict social distancing at the polls. On Wednesday, South Korea had zero local infections for the first time since the outbreak was first recorded 72 days previously (though four new cases had been imported.) “This is the strength of South Korea and its people,” President Moon Jae-in said on announcing the news.

South Korea’s health and welfare minister Park Neung-hoo explained to TIME exactly how his nation engineered such a remarkable turnaround. The following written answers were translated from Korean and have been edited for length and clarity.

What was your reaction when you first heard about the virus? I imagine you must get a lot of these alerts that turn out to be nothing?

The bitter memory of MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome) puts me on edge whenever a novel virus infection is reported, so we thoroughly check up on any new viral outbreaks. [South Korea had the second-largest number of MERS cases after Saudi Arabia and its public health response was highly criticized.] So we tried to collect as much information as possible, and I thought that quick, early action should be taken.

What were the most critical policies toward containing COVID-19?

As COVID-19 displays very unique features, we needed to be creative and innovative, as well as using traditional methods to combat the virus. For example, drive-thru screening clinics, an ICT [information and communications technology] app called Special Immigration Procedure [provided to new airport arrivals], and Life Treatment Centers for patients with mild symptoms were innovative. If we had failed to separate them and tried to put all new patients in hospitals, our overloaded healthcare system could have collapsed.

In addition, if we had delayed developing test kits by a month, without prior and proactive consultation and cooperation with the private sector, our current system based around quick, mass testing couldn’t have been established.

How do instant test results help thorough contact tracing?

COVID-19 is highly contagious in the early stage of infection and even when the symptom is mild, and it spreads fast. Therefore, it is critical that the infected patient is identified and isolated as quickly as possible in containing the spread of the virus. For this, a quick test is essential.

How important has technology proved for contact tracing?

ICT plays a decisive role in accurately identifying people and swiftly locating their contacts. For example, tracing them through credit card usage, CCTV, mobile phone location tracing, and so on helps us to learn about a patient’s travel time, route and location quickly, and can also help to identify close contacts of the patient. The faster we find the contacts, the better we are able to stem further spread of the virus.

Why did you decide to make drive-through testing so widespread?

Drive-thru screening clinics are much faster and safer than ordinary screening clinics. Examination, temperature check, and specimen collection are done while the driver is still sitting in the car. Conventional specimen collection may take half an hour compared with only ten minutes in total for drive-thru. And the risk of cross infection between the medical professionals and visitors is significantly reduced.

What would be your advice for other nations trying to contain COVID-19?

Since COVID-19 spreads very fast, an early diagnostic test is critical. About 80% of COVID-19 patients have mild symptoms, and only 10% have severe symptoms. So the medical system needs to respond accordingly. In other words, efficient allocation of limited medical resources is very important.

Next, the greatest leverage we have for controlling COVID-19 is people’s trust in the state. Deep trust not only minimizes public anxiety, but is critical in inducing the participation and cooperation of the people in enforcing the potent vaccine that is social distancing.

For this, it is very important to provide relevant information to the people in the most transparent possible manner. In addition, it is also important to have smooth inter-ministerial and central-to-local governmental communication.

How did you resist the urge to impose more draconian containment measures like in China or other countries?

We never considered a full lockdown as part of our policy response to COVID-19. Although there was an explosive new outbreak in a certain region, we had confidence that we could locate contacts and isolate them successfully.

South Korea is a democracy which respects and ensures the individual freedom of the people as much as possible, so we relied on people’s voluntary cooperation based on their trust in public anti-epidemic authorities.

As such, instead of physical lockdown, we fought the virus through an epidemiological approach such as wide diagnostic testing and isolation of contacts, while encouraging people’s voluntary cooperation for social distancing. We believed this was more effective than forcible measures and indeed it paid off.

How do you weigh public health concerns versus restarting the economy?

Finding a mid-point between economic activities and containing an epidemic outbreak is a delicate balancing act. Given the nature of COVID-19, it will be next to impossible to wipe it out without the development of a vaccine.

The key is whether we are able to keep COVID-19 cases within our medical system’s capacity to treat to patients. In Korea, we set strict standards and regularly evaluate how patient numbers match our medical capacity, allowing us balance the two pressing needs [of public health and economy.]

Do you feel public pressure to end containment measures and open up?

Just like epidemic prevention is part of our life, so are socioeconomic activities. We need economic activities to ensure a sustainable anti-epidemic response. I perceive the need and feel the pressure for normalization of economic activities.

Anti-epidemic authorities are making an ongoing assessment of the current progress and are exploring ways to achieve both minimal risk of spread of infection and normal life and economic activities. For example, from the end of March until mid-April, strengthened social distancing was enforced. From Apr. 20 to May 5, some public facilities are reopening, gradually easing the strength of social distancing.

We will continue to adjust the level of social distancing in consideration of further progress, and we are ready to implement a “social distancing in normal life,” under which our normal life and virus containment can both be achieved in balance with each other.

—With reporting and translation by Stephen Kim/Seoul

Why Many Japanese People Are Ignoring Their Government’s Pleas to Stay Home During a Major Holiday Break

(TOKYO) — Under Japan’s coronavirus state of emergency, people have been asked to stay home. Many are not. Some still have to commute to their jobs despite risks of infection, while others continue to dine out, picnic in parks and crowd into grocery stores with scant regard for social distancing.

On Wednesday, the first day of the “Golden Week” holidays that run through May 5, Tokyo’s leafy Shiba Park was packed with families with small children, day camping in tents.

The lure of heading out for Golden Week holidays is testing the public’s will to unite against a common enemy as health workers warn rising coronavirus cases are overwhelming the medical system in some places. Experts say a sense of urgency is missing, thanks to mixed messaging from the government and a lack of incentives to stay home.

In distant, tropical Okinawa, locals have resorted to posting social media appeals to tourists not to visit, “to protect our grannies and grandpas.”

“Please cancel your trip to Okinawa and wait until we can welcome you,” Okinawa’s governor Denny Tamaki tweeted. “Unfortunately Okinawa can provide no hospitality and our medical systems, including on remote islands, are in a state of emergency.”

In this country driven by conformity and consensus, the pandemic is pitting those willing to follow the rules against a sizable minority who are resisting the calls to stay home.

To get better compliance, the government needs stronger messaging, said Naoya Sekiya, a University of Tokyo professor and expert of social psychology and risk communications.

A tougher lockdown would also help.

While the halfhearted adherence to the calls to stay home has dismayed Tokyo Gov. Yuriko Koike, none of those spurning the advice are breaking the law. Legally, the state of emergency can only involve requests for compliance. Violators face no penalties. There are few incentives to close shops.

The main message has been economy first, safety second: Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has insisted Japan will not adopt European-style hard lockdowns that would paralyze the economy. His economy minister heads the government’s coronavirus task force meetings.

“The message coming from the government is rather mild, apparently trying to convey the need to stay home while prioritizing the economy,” Sekiya said. Since people lack a shared sense of crisis, instead of staying home they’re hoping for the best and assuming they won’t get infected, he said.

Three-quarters of people responding to a recent survey by the Asahi newspaper said they are going out less than usual. But just over half felt they could comply with Abe’s call to reduce their social interactions by 80%.

People of all ages are shrugging off the stay-at-home request. The popular “scramble” intersection in downtown Tokyo’s Shibuya looked uncrowded, but eateries and pubs on backstreets were still busy. In the western suburb of Kichijoji, narrow shopping streets were jammed during the weekend with families strolling and heading to lunch. Pachinko pinball parlors have drawn ire for staying open despite name-and-shame announcements and other pressure to close. Bars and restaurants are ignoring a requested 8 p.m. closing time.

“It’s ridiculous,” said an 80-year-old man drinking Wednesday at a downtown bar. “What am I supposed to do at home? I’d only be watching TV.”

Officials are trying to fight back. In Kichijoji, they patrolled shopping arcades carrying banners saying “Please, do not go out.” Local mayors appealed to the government to close the crowded Shonan beach, popular with surfers and families, south of Tokyo. Some prefectures have set up border checkpoints to spot non-local license plates.

“It seems not everyone shares the sense of crisis,” said Kazunobu Nishikawa, a disaster prevention official in Musashino city, which oversees Kichijoji. “Many people understand the risks of this infectious disease,” he said, but “others seem to think COVID-19 is nothing more than a common cold and don’t care as long as they don’t catch it.”

Abe declared the state of emergency on April 7, as virus cases surged. It initially covered only Tokyo and six other areas but later expanded to include the whole country.

Abe did not ask non-essential businesses to close. But Koike, the Tokyo governor, fought and prevailed in requesting that schools, movie theaters, athletic clubs, hostess bars and other such businesses in the city be asked to close. Most restaurants and pubs still can operate from 5 a.m. to 8 p.m., and grocery and convenience stores and public transport remain open as usual.

The government has rolled out an unprecedentedly huge economic package of 108 trillion yen ($1 trillion) that included loans for small businesses and other coronavirus measures. Responding to criticism he was neglecting individuals and families in dire need of cash to survive, Abe belatedly announced cash payouts of 100,000 yen each to all residents of Japan.

Survey data show the 80% social distancing target has roughly been met during weekends, with the numbers of nightlife goers and commuters noticeably lower. But parks and popular outdoor spots in Japan’s densely crowded cities are still bustling with people, said Hiroshi Nishiura, a Hokkaido University professor and expert of epidemiological analysis.

Tokyo reported 47 newly confirmed cases on Wednesday, with the total across the nation just over 14,000, though limited testing means the number of infections is likely much higher.

Call center employee Mayumi Shibata is among the many Japanese who cannot fully work from home, partly because much paperwork in this modern nation is still not computerized and most documents must be stamped in person using ink seals.

“I will commute as long as I can keep my job,” Shibata said while standing outside the busy downtown Shinagawa train station one recent morning.

With the trains slightly less crowded, conditions for commuting are better, and she tries to take her lunch break outside, if it’s not raining, to get some fresh air. “I’m trying not to get infected,” she said.

___

AP video journalists Emily Wang and Haruka Nuga contributed to this report.

Amazon Says It May Lose Money During Coronavirus as It Increases Spending on Logistics and Worker Safety

Amazon.com Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos normally uses the company’s earnings report to extol the virtues of Alexa or the benefits of Prime. On Thursday, he told investors to hold on tight as his company navigates “the hardest time we’ve ever faced.”

The largest U.S. online retailer saw profit shrink and said it may incur a loss in the current quarter as it boosts spending to keep logistics operations running smoothly during the coronavirus pandemic.

“Under normal circumstances, in this coming Q2, we’d expect to make some $4 billion or more in operating profit,” Bezos said Thursday in a statement reporting Amazon’s results. “But these aren’t normal circumstances. Instead, we expect to spend the entirety of that $4 billion, and perhaps a bit more, on Covid-related expenses getting products to customers and keeping employees safe.”

Operating income could range from $1.5 billion to a loss of $1.5 billion in the quarter ending in June, the Seattle-based company said.

Forecasting a potential loss added a dour note to financial results that showcased the success of a company built to thrive when online shopping is the only option for many shoppers. Unit sales, a closely watched metric, surged 32% in the first quarter. That’s the fastest pace since the fourth quarter of 2012.

The coronavirus pandemic is accelerating long-term trends in favor of Amazon and online shopping, while further weakening brick-and-mortar stores. The company, which has prioritized stocking essential goods, is one of the few large retailers that have continued to operate relatively normally during the crisis.

And, as expected, sales increased 26% to $75.5 billion in the quarter that included the outbreak of Covid-19 in the U.S. Net income was $5.01 per share. Analysts, on average, estimated $73.7 billion in revenue and earnings of $6.27 a share, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

The company, the second-largest private sector employer in the U.S. after Walmart, has faced criticism from employees, unions and politicians that it isn’t doing enough to protect workers. Amazon took the rare step in its earnings statement of recapping the safety measures it has enacted during the pandemic — and its contributions to food banks, students and health care workers — before its typical list trumpeting the quarter’s new products and services.

Bezos said the coronavirus effort included spending on personal protective equipment, enhanced cleaning of warehouses and stores and operational changes to promote social distancing.

“Providing for customers and protecting employees as this crisis continues for more months is going to take skill, humility, invention, and money,” he said. “If you’re a shareowner in Amazon, you may want to take a seat, because we’re not thinking small.”

Amazon spokesman Dan Perlet declined to disclose the number of Covid-19 cases in the company’s ranks.

Amazon and other large web retailers have a sense of duty because they’re so ingrained in people’s lives as a result of the pandemic, said Martin Garner of CCS Insight. “They have a clear role in society to help. Amazon has also taken a lot of negative publicity recently, so this massive Covid-19 spend should help address that,’” he said.

Amazon’s big investments, in new data centers to expand its cloud-computing business and warehouses to expand its e-commerce capacity, have historically paid off for investors by leading to increased revenue, but it’s not clear that will be the case with spending in response to the pandemic, said Brian Yarbrough, analyst at Edward D. Jones & Co. Amazon is hiring people, buying Covid-19 tests and cleaning facilities, which can be ongoing costs without providing any long-term gains, he said.

The company had previously said that a hiring binge beginning in mid-March and a temporary $2 an hour hazard pay raise for its hundreds of thousands of warehouse workers would ultimately cost some $700 million. On a conference call with reporters, Chief Financial Officer Brian Olsavsky said 175,000 additional jobs had been filled to help meet demand and take the place of workers sheltering at home.

Amazon’s fulfillment costs surged 34% to $11.5 billion from the period a year earlier. Shipping costs rose 49% to $10.9 billion.

“They’ve got a choppy history and investors have given them a lot of leeway because they’ve harvested the benefits of those investments later, but this one is a little more tricky,” Yarbrough said. “Some of these costs seem like they’re going to stick around, which brings the profitability of the company into question.”

Sales in Amazon’s physical stores category, which is almost entirely Whole Food Market stores, rose 8% to $4.6 billion in the quarter, the largest increase since Amazon bought the organic grocer in 2017. That tally doesn’t include online sales from Whole Foods, which surged in March as people stocked up and overwhelmed Amazon’s food delivery infrastructure. Olsavsky didn’t offer a combined revenue growth rate for Amazon’s grocery business, but said the company had expanded grocery delivery capacity by 60% during the quarter.

Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing unit that in recent years has accounted for most of the company’s operating income, posted sales of $10.2 billion, up 33%, and just below analysts’ estimates.

Amazon shares declined about 4.5% in extended trading after the results. The stock closed at $2,474 in New York and has jumped more than 33% in 2020.

How the Trump-China Rivalry Has Hampered U.S. Intelligence on COVID-19

In mid-November, U.S. military and intelligence analysts began to suspect that something might be wrong in the central Chinese city of Wuhan. The CIA was getting reports from the city that there was an outbreak of pneumonia. High resolution spy satellite photographs showed activity around medical centers and diminishing traffic in the streets. National Security Agency eavesdropping detected an increase in what appeared to be medical calls within the city, in the surrounding Hubei Province, and between Wuhan and government offices in Beijing.

For about a month, there was no way to assemble the scattered bits of intelligence into any confident assessment of what was happening, say four U.S. intelligence and defense officials, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the raw reports. But as the activity increased and the reports from the city continued, some officials at the CIA and the National Center for Medical Intelligence began musing about whether something more serious than pneumonia or a seasonal flu might be spreading. Maybe something worse – something even more contagious.

More than five months and 225,000 deaths later, the U.S. intelligence community’s efforts to piece together the early spread of COVID-19 has been clouded by politics and self-interest in both China and the U.S., two of the countries that have suffered the most from the pandemic. Rather than doing all they could to share information to minimize the virus’ spread, both China and the U.S. have all too often focused on blaming the other for starting it.

Early in January, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) started including a warning in many of President Trump’s daily intelligence briefs, say two of the officials who helped compile it. The president, they say, was uninterested. So were Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Defense Secretary Mark Esper, and other senior officials, the officials say, who routinely receive copies of the PDB and generally avoid confronting the president. What the intelligence officials and health experts could not tell the President— and still cannot today — is where the virus came from.

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Politicians in Washington and Beijing have been quick to fill the vacuum. On Jan. 23, Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton told a Senate hearing that the Chinese government might have developed the bug as a bioweapon in a “superlaboratory” in Wuhan, and had been “lying about it from the very beginning.” That triggered a burst of conspiracy theories shared widely on social media, including by Patriots for Truth, a self-described patriotic organization that claimed on Jan. 28 there was “definitive proof the Coronavirus is a globalist bioweapon.”

China’s ambassador to the U.S. has called the theory “harmful and “dangerous,” and on March 13, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian escalated the conspiracy theory war with a series of tweets charging that the disease actually had first traveled to Wuhan with American soldiers who had participated in the October Military World Games there. That, too, took on a life of its own, the Army Times reported, powered in part by Russian and Chinese websites and social media.

The U.S.-China feud briefly subsided for a few weeks in late March and early April as both sides appeared to recognize the danger of escalation during a pandemic that was claiming thousands of lives. Trump stopped referring to the disease as the “China virus” and the “Wuhan virus.” High-ranking Chinese officials distanced themselves from Lijian’s accusation, and he eventually retreated.

But as the pandemic further accelerated and the economy sharply contracted in the U.S., Trump’s administration has returned to blaming China. During the last two months, he and other top officials have pressed intelligence and medical officials to press their investigations into whether the COVID-19 virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a laboratory in Wuhan where Chinese virologists study diseases carried by bats and other animals, according to U.S. officials. Reports of that pressure first appeared in the New York Times on Thursday.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has charged that by concealing what it knew about Covid-19’s origins, China poses a threat to the entire world. “The Chinese Communist Party now has a responsibility to tell the world how this pandemic got out of China, causing such global economic devastation,” Pompeo told Fox News on April 29. In an interview with NBC News the same day, Chinese Executive Vice Foreign Minister Le Yucheng blamed the U.S. for responding to the threat too slowly. “Some political figures are politicizing this COVID-19,” he said. “They’re using this virus to stigmatize China.”

U.S. intelligence officials have investigated and dismissed claims that the virus was “manmade or genetically modified,” according to an April 30 ODNI statement, and neither spies nor scientists have found sufficient evidence to support some U.S. officials’ public suggestions that the virus escaped from a Chinese government laboratory. Details of the intelligence community’s early investigations appeared first in the Washington Post and New York Times.

Intelligence officials say satellites, human sources, communications intercepts, and other tools have not detected unusual activity at or around the Wuhan Institute of Virology or the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention that would suggest a cleanup, a lockdown, an official investigation, or a purge. “The Chinese are adept at concealment, so we haven’t ruled anything out, but we don’t have an indictment, either,” said one of the officials.

It also may be impossible to prove that the virus did not escape from a lab in Wuhan. Even the most secure labs, called Biosafety Level 4, are not immune to leaks. In 2019, the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute at Ft. Detrick, Maryland stopped doing high-level research after the CDC found security lapses there, the Frederick News-Post reported after obtaining the CDC reports under a Freedom of Information Act request.

Two U.S. intelligence officials said the administration’s persistent efforts to pin the blame on a Chinese government lab remind them of the Bush Administration’s demands for intelligence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. “It was a mistake to bow to political pressure then, and it would be a mistake now,” said one of the officials.

Please send tips, leads, and stories from the frontlines to virus@time.com.

The Parks and Recreation Reunion Was a Sweet, Slight Dispatch From an Alternate Universe

Parks and Recreation has only been off the air for five years, but what a five years it has been. When the NBC sitcom about a tireless, obsessive, irrepressibly kind public servant—Amy Poehler‘s Leslie Knope—and her beloved colleagues aired its finale, on February 24, 2015, America had a very different collective self-image. A global network of Ebola fighters had just won a tough, worrisome but nonetheless decisive battle against that deadly virus. After a devastating summer of police violence, the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement at least seemed poised to effect positive change. As pop culture was making unprecedented strides in trans representation, an unstoppable queer rights movement was about to make same-sex marriage legal in all 50 states. Our first black President still had two years left in his second term, and Donald Trump was four months away from officially kicking off his campaign. The idea that the best way to represent a red state like Indiana—home to Parks‘ fictional city of Pawnee and the titular department Leslie helps run—was as a hub of cheerful, multicultural, bipartisan progress didn’t seem that farfetched.

But by April 30, 2020, as the show returned to NBC for a one-off reunion special to benefit Feeding America, the national mood had—to put it extremely mildly—shifted. In contrast to post-racial Pawnee, we’ve had to contend with a fresh wave of white nationalism and xenophobia; “kids in cages” is not a phrase I can imagine coming out of the mouth of anyone in that city’s government. #MeToo has all but squashed the notion that a woman could rise to a position of power without encountering some form of sexual misconduct. (That reckoning eventually came for both series regular Aziz Ansari and—to a far greater, more disappointing extent—frequent guest star Louis C.K. “I don’t remember when I heard the rumors about him,” co-creator Mike Schur said at the time. “But I’m sure it was before the last time he was on Parks and Rec. And that sucks. And I’m sorry.”) And a country where Leslie Knope works in the Department of the Interior, a position to which she ascended in the finale, is not a country that could be blindsided by the novel coronavirus. Her gentle, scrupulously informed competence can’t exist in the same universe where entire news cycles are devoted to parsing whether the President suggested drinking bleach.

And so the reunion takes place not in the real Indiana or America but in a sort of utopian alternate Indiana, USA—one that has also somehow fallen prey to the COVID-19 pandemic. Scripted by Schur with a handful of the show’s original writers and filmed via smartphone from each social-distancing star’s home, the half-hour episode is a collage of video chats and local news programs. Leslie has, of course, instituted a daily “7 PM phone tree” to make sure all of her former co-workers, spread out across the country though they may be, are mentally as well as physically healthy. Her loving husband Ben Wyatt (Adam Scott) is now a Congressman but still possesses the manic nerd energy to imagine Cones of Dunshire spinoffs.

Meanwhile, Ron Swanson (Nick Offerman), logging on from his/Offerman’s wood shop, boasts that “I’ve been practicing social distancing since I was four years old.” Treat Yo’ Self pals Tom (Ansari) and Donna (Retta) are indulging in tropical Zoom—sorry, Gryzzl—backgrounds; Tom has been brainstorming such quarantine-themed inventions as “a clock with dials that just move randomly.” April (Aubrey Plaza with a bikini top draped over her head) and Andy (Chris Pratt), wild imaginations intact, are thriving in isolation. Because Ann (Rashida Jones) has gone back to work as a nurse, she and Chris (Rob Lowe) are quarantining in separate areas of their home. No one wants to be the one to check in on office scapegoat Garry “Jerry” Gergich (eternal good sport Jim O’Heir), whose ineptitude with technology does not disappoint.

Leslie and Ben’s appearances on local news programs, to dispense bleach-free advice on best coronavirus practices, offer an excuse to bring back some other familiar faces—not just demented talk-show host Joan Callamezzo (Mo Collins) and awkward anchor Perd Hapley (Jay Jackson), but also beloved guest stars like Jon Glaser as devious dentist Jeremy Jamm and Jason Mantzoukas’ ridiculous fragrance magnate Dennis Feinstein. With apologies to Sweetums heir Bobby Newport (Paul Rudd), who opens the episode from his family’s “private fox-hunting estate” in Switzerland, and the captive Tammy 2 (Megan Mullally, taking full advantage of the fact that she and Offerman are actually married and sheltering together), the best of these surprises is a commercial from Ben Schwartz’s Jean-Ralphio. Coiffed and scarfed to the nines, all he has to advertise is his own his phone number. “I have been banned from Cameo,” he explains, in song, “for doing my videos naked.”

Is anyone in the special actually sick with COVID-19 or mourning loved ones who’ve died of it? Of course not. Jerry’s Season 5 “fart attack” notwithstanding, Pawnee is not a place of illness and death. Its only fallen hero is miniature horse Li’l Sebastian—and you’d better believe the Parks Dept. alums are still broken up enough about that loss to close out their group chat with a rousing rendition of Andy’s tribute song, “5,000 Candles in the Wind.” In the end, despite the social distancing that the reunion had no choice but to depict, Parks is exactly as we left it five years ago: light, funny, comforting but willfully naive, and ultimately more appealing for its cast and the chemistry they’ve somehow retained than it is convincing in its worldview.

Even in its heyday, Parks and Recreation was pegged by some critics as a “liberal fantasy” and faced criticism for its “childish optimism“—both fair assessments, as far as I’m concerned. Most of us probably decided long ago how we feel about the show’s limited range of emotions, its inability to imagine a harder, crueler reality. (Wouldn’t a real-life Ron Swanson, staunch libertarian that he is, be grumbling about the overreaches of a hysterical “nanny state” these days?) Watching the reunion special, I found I could still enjoy its bighearted comedy, albeit less as optimistic realism and more as utopian science fiction.

Joe Biden Expected to Face Questions About Sexual Assault Allegation on Friday

(WASHINGTON) — A sexual assault allegation is Joe Biden’s first big challenge as the Democrats’ presidential nominee, fueling Republican attacks and leaving many in his own party in an uncomfortable bind.

Biden’s campaign has denied the allegation from his former Senate staffer Tara Reade, who has said Biden assaulted her in the basement of a Capitol Hill office building in the 1990s. But the story garnered fresh attention this week after two of Reade’s associates said she previously told them about elements of her allegations.

Republicans worried about President Donald Trump’s increasingly precarious political standing are seizing on the allegation to portray Democrats as hypocrites who only defend women who allege wrongdoing against conservatives. They are digging in despite the fact that it could renew attention on the multiple sexual assault allegations lodged against Trump.

Democrats, meanwhile, are in an awkward position of vigorously validating women who come forward with their stories while defending the man who will be their standard-bearer in what many in the party consider the most important election of their lifetimes.

The tension is heightened because Biden himself has said nothing about the allegation.

Like many Americans, he has spent the past several weeks at home to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Biden has participated in a handful of local and national interviews, during which he wasn’t asked about the allegation. He will be interviewed Friday morning on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” and is expected to face questions about the accusations.

Ahead of that appearance, Democrats urged a more forceful response.

“The campaign has issued statements, but he hasn’t issued any statements in his own voice,” said former Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Donna Brazile. “It’s not helping, it’s just damaging — not only to the person who has come forward, but it’s also damaging the candidate.”

Lis Smith, a top strategist on Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign, also called on the Biden campaign to speak up.

“These accusations have not been found to be credible, so it’s in the Biden campaign’s interest to nip this in the bud directly and do it quickly,” she said.

The November contest between Biden and Trump will be the first presidential race of the #MeToo era, which has led numerous women to come forward with allegations of sexual assault. Trump has been accused of assault and unwanted touching by numerous women, allegations he denies.

Women are a core constituency for Democrats, and Biden has a mixed history. While he wrote the Violence Against Women Act as a senator, he also came under heavy criticism for his handling of Anita Hill’s Senate testimony in the 1990s. Just before he launched his 2020 campaign, several women accused him of unwanted touching, behavior for which he apologized.

Biden has pledged to pick a woman as a running mate, and the allegation has left those thought to be in contention in a tough spot.

Stacey Abrams, the former Georgia Democratic governor candidate, said, “I believe Joe Biden,” citing a New York Times investigation that she said exonerated him.

“Women deserve to be heard,” she said, “but I also believe that those allegations have to be investigated by credible sources.”

That echoed talking points issued by the Biden campaign to surrogates last week that were obtained by The Associated Press. They pointed to investigations by The New York Times, The Washington Post and the AP that found no other allegation of sexual assault and no pattern of sexual misconduct.

On Thursday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi also defended Biden. Speaking on CNN, she said she was “satisfied with how he has responded,” even as she acknowledged “it’s a matter that he has to deal with.”

Some Democratic donors and fundraisers say the issue has not come up in calls with party financiers. Others worry that it could be used against Biden, much as Hillary Clinton’s private email server and the activities of the Clinton Foundation were wielded against her by Trump.

Some, most notably women, say they are paying close attention to the allegations, which gave them pause.

Alex Sink, a donor and former Democratic nominee for governor of Florida, said she was “not happy” to read about the allegations against Biden. While she still plans to vote for him, she worried his campaign was too quick to categorically deny Reade’s story.

“They put themselves immediately out on a limb by saying, ‘It didn’t happen, we categorically deny it, it’s not true,’” Sink said.

Some female Democratic operatives expressed concerns the allegation is particularly damaging because it’s an indictment of Biden’s central campaign rationale: that he provides a moral counter to Trump and that the election is a “battle for the soul of America.”

“The stakes could not be higher for defeating Donald Trump — but at the same time, I think we have to apply a consistent standard for how we treat allegations of sexual assault, and also be clear-eyed about how Donald Trump will use these allegations in the general election campaign,” said Claire Sandberg, who worked as Bernie Sanders’ organizing director.

The silence from the Biden campaign has given Republicans an opening on an issue that was, in 2016, more fraught for the GOP, when Trump was asked to answer for the more than two dozen women who alleged varying levels of sexual assault and harassment. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told Fox News on Thursday that Biden will “have to participate in releasing all the information related to” the allegation, a stance he didn’t take when Trump faced misconduct accusations.

The GOP argues Democrats aren’t being consistent, pointing to aggressive questioning and coverage of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh when he faced an allegation of sexual assault.

Speaking about the allegation for the first time on Friday, Trump said Biden “should respond” before proceeding to criticize the treatment of Kavanaugh as “an absolute disgrace to our country.”

Steve Guest, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee, said “the left, and their media allies, has one standard for Republicans and another standard for Democrats like Joe Biden.”

“The double standard,” he said, “is appalling.”

___

Associated Press writers Brian Slodysko in Washington and Bill Barrow in Atlanta contributed to this report.

For Some Reluctant Trump Voters, Coronavirus Was The Last Straw

Heidi and Dennis Hodges were proud to vote for President Donald Trump in 2016. “I liked his tough stance. I liked that he wasn’t a politician,” says Dennis, who runs a window-tinting company in Erie, Penn. “I supported him for three and a half years,” says Heidi, who manages the office of an auto service shop.

Then came the coronavirus crisis. For Dennis, the last straw was seeing Trump downplay the seriousness of COVID-19, even as troubling reports about the disease emerged from China. “Before the pandemic, Trump would have gotten my vote again,” he says. “Business was booming, the economy was good, it looked like everything was turned around.”

For Heidi, the stakes were personal: In March, her uncle had to visit the ER three times before he could get tested for COVID-19, she says. By the time he was finally admitted to the hospital on March 23, he was so sick he had to be put in a medically induced coma. He was on a ventilator for 28 days before his condition improved, she says. Trump “is sitting there touting that nobody has an issue with getting a test,” says Heidi. “And that’s not true.”

One of the defining questions of the 2020 election is how many Trump voters feel in November like Heidi and Dennis Hodges do now. Over the past four years, Trump has developed a Teflon mystique: no matter what he says or does, nothing seems to stick to him. Predicting that the latest outrage will finally sever his bond with supporters has been a mug’s game. And even as the coronavirus crisis escalated in March and April, there have been few signs that this is changing: 93% of self-described Republicans said during the first half of April that they approved of Trump’s performance, according to Gallup—up two points from a month prior.

Yet there is also little question that the pandemic has transformed the election. Two months ago, Trump was an incumbent president riding a strong economy and a massive cash advantage; today, he looks like an underdog in November. The RealClearPolitics polling average has former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, leading Trump 48.3% to 42% nationally. Trump’s prospects aren’t any brighter right now when broken down by states that were key to his 2016 victory. According to Real Clear Politics polling averages, Biden leads Trump by 6.7 points in Pennsylvania, 5.5 in Michigan, and 2.7 points in Wisconsin. Biden is also leading Trump narrowly in Florida and Arizona.

“If you look at all the swing states, virtually all of them, he’s underwater,” says Douglas Schoen, a former pollster for President Bill Clinton and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. “This election is a referendum on Trump,” Schoen continues. “And so far from what we see over the last month, month and a half, he’s losing that referendum.”

The coronavirus pandemic has revealed that not every Trump voter is a loyalist. In a 2016 race between two historically unpopular candidates, some Trump voters made a choice for the candidate they disliked less, not the one they liked more. Trump lost the popular vote in 2016 but was lifted to victory in the Electoral College by about 80,000 votes cast in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

Now his lackluster response to a global health crisis may cost him the support of some of those reluctant voters. Pamela Rodriguez, 60, is a retired teacher in Arizona who voted for Trump in 2016. The lifelong Republican says she first started to nurse doubts about the President when he mocked the late Arizona Senator John McCain. But Trump’s response to the coronavirus, she says, has sealed her departure from the GOP. “It’s really cemented that I don’t belong in this party any longer,” she says. She plans to vote for Biden, as well as Democratic Senate candidate Mark Kelly.

Even in red states, some voters who supported the President in 2016 but had since nursed doubts about his leadership say COVID-19 was their breaking point. “I just don’t think he’s done anything to protect us,” says Jami Cole, a 48-year old teacher in Oklahoma who supported Trump until the teachers’ walkouts in 2018. “I think the whole COVID thing has just sealed it.”

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Cole and other disillusioned voters contacted for this piece are members of a private Facebook Group called “Former Trump Supporters,” where disappointed Trump voters gather to discuss their thoughts. The group was started by David Weissman, a 2016 Trump voter in Florida who now frequently tweets about his journey from Trump voter to liberal Democrat. Weissman started the group on April 20. Now there are roughly 1,500 members.

Trump’s response to coronavirus “was the final straw,” says Jessica Lavine Freeman, 48, who voted for Trump in Georgia in 2016 and now plans to support Biden. “If we had sat down and had this conversation in August of last year, I probably would have voted for Trump again.”

Brandon Hughes, a 32-year-old patient-access director at a Kentucky hospital, says he voted for Trump over Clinton partly because he figured “they’re both terrible choices.” He says he now feels a deep shame about that decision as he thinks about explaining Trump’s pandemic response to his six-year old daughter. “It’s a pandemic where over 50,000 people have died, and he shows no empathy, no remorse, no compassion—it’s all about ratings and opening up the economy as quickly as possible,” says Hughes. “I don’t think he’s capable of compassion and empathy. If he can’t show it during this, in what instance would he?”

As the Gallup polling reveals, these voters do not represent the majority of Trump’s backers, who have overwhelmingly stuck with him. “I don’t hold the President responsible for a virus that has killed people across our entire world,” says Sarah Hobson, a law firm owner from Canton, Ga., who voted for Trump in 2016 and plans to do so again. “I think he’s doing the best he can.”

Republican strategists note the pendulum could easily swing back in Trump’s direction before the election. “Three months ago we were all certain that this election was going to be about impeachment, and three months before that it was all going to be about the border wall,” says Brad Todd, a Republican strategist and co-author of The Great Revolt. But he sees signs of trouble in the polling of voters who dislike both candidates. In 2016, those voters picked Trump; in 2020, they favor Biden. “It is a warning sign” for Trump, Todd says.

For now, the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee are focusing on 17 battlegrounds, including key swing states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Florida and harder targets like New Mexico and Colorado. “If we believed public polling, we wouldn’t have this conversation right now, because there wouldn’t be a re-elect,” Trump Victory spokesman Rick Gorka says when asked about the polling showing Biden leading in most swing states.

But even though the proportion of Trump voters who have grown disaffected is small, these voters could prove decisive, since Trump has failed to expand his support beyond his core base, notes presidential scholar Martha Joynt Kumar. “He likes to get to his base and he needs them,” says Kumar. “He needs them to be energized, because he got 46% of the popular vote [in 2016], and he needs to do better than that in order to win.”

The coronavirus crisis has highlighted the potential danger of that approach. “There’s a group of people who voted for him because he was the lesser of two evils who are now probably going to vote against him,” says Dennis Hodges. “I’m not for Biden, but he’s going to get my vote, and my family’s vote, just because of the inadequate response from top to bottom in every aspect of this pandemic.”

Please send tips, leads, and stories from the frontlines to virus@time.com.

‘We Can’t Telecommute to Combat.’ Army Defends Decision to Hold In-Person West Point Graduation

(WASHINGTON) — The Army’s top leaders on Thursday defended their decision to bring 1,000 cadets back to the Military Academy at West Point for graduation, where President Donald Trump is slated to speak, saying that despite the coronovirus risk students would have had to return anyway to prepare for their next duty assignment.

The announcement has been criticized as a political move to get Trump on stage at the academy, where he hasn’t yet given a graduation address. But Army officials said the students must return for final medical checks, equipment and training.

“We can’t telecommute to combat,” Gen. James McConville, the chief of staff of the Army, told Pentagon reporters when asked about the decision, which forces cadets spread out across the U.S. to travel, risking exposure on public transportation, and then land in New York, a coronavirus hot spot.

Read more: Coronavirus Has Hit the U.S. Military, and America’s Adversaries Are Seeking Advantage

Cadets have been home since spring break in March, with their return to school delayed because of the outbreak. Only the seniors will return, and the graduation is set for June 13.

Lt. Gen. Darryl Williams, academy superintendent, said the students must return for medical and other required tasks that can only be done at the academy before they can be turned over as new officers to the Army.

He said the school will create a “safety bubble” around the cadets and build a staging base where they will arrive. All cadets will be screened and tested for the virus at the staging area and then separated into five groups that will eat and live separately. They will be quarantined for 14 days.

Williams said Keller Army Community Hospital at the base now has all the needed testing equipment, and was converted to be able to handle and quarantine virus patients.

Asked if cadets will face discipline if they can’t or don’t want to come back because of the virus, he said commanders will decide on a case-by-case basis.

U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., a member of West Point’s Board of Visitors, said she expressed her concerns about the decision to Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy in a call this week.

“Trump’s reckless decision to gather 1,000 Cadets at West Point for a speech puts our future military leaders at increased risk — all to stroke his own ego,” said Duckworth, a retired Army helicopter pilot, who served in the Iraq war and received a Purple Heart.

McCarthy told reporters the Army wants to have a “small, safe graduation ceremony” for the cadets to celebrate.

In contrast, the U.S. Naval Academy has announced it will hold a virtual graduation and postpone other traditional milestone events until large-scale gatherings are allowed. The academy’s superintendent, Vice Adm. Sean Buck, called it a difficult decision but necessary “to safeguard the health and welfare of the entire Naval Academy family and local community.”

The U.S. Air Force Academy opted to hold a scaled-down ceremony with hundreds of graduating cadets sitting in chairs eight feet apart on the school’s parade field, instead of in its stadium. The ceremony was closed to visitors.

West Point’s graduation ceremonies are usually held in May in a football stadium.

The First Rounds of Coronavirus Relief Didn’t Include Primary Caregivers. These Lawmakers Want to Change That

As House Democrats work to craft their next coronavirus relief package, two members are working to ensure home health care workers are receiving the protections they need as they continue to care for patients during the pandemic.

Reps. Joaquin Castro and Deb Haaland sent a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy on Thursday urging the leaders both to explicitly define home health care aides and child caregivers as essential workers in the next relief bill, and to ensure these employees are provided with free personal protective equipment (PPE) like masks and gloves, hazard pay, and affordable health care plans that include testing and mental health services.

“It is vital that we invest in home and community-based care infrastructure and that caregivers have the benefits and resources needed to fight COVID-19,” Haaland and Castro wrote to Pelosi and McCarthy in the letter, which was first reported by TIME. “The first three COVID-19 relief bills largely overlooked the needs of caregivers and those whose care needs may be best served in their homes.”

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Governors of some states, like California, have already defined home health care workers as essential workers. But at the federal level, the definition as established under the CARES Act, which President Trump signed into law March 27th, is still relatively vague. In order to ensure these workers get the provisions, Haaland and Castro are calling on Congressional leaders to “adopt an expansive definition of who is an essential worker” that includes home health care aides and childcare workers.

By defining these workers as essential, Castro explained, it would automatically render them eligible for potential government benefits in the next round of legislation.

“When we consider things like hazard pay for essential workers, which I believe that we will, for when we consider issues like family leave and expanded medical leave, those essential workers I believe will benefit most,” Castro said in an interview. “These home health care workers and caregivers have been essential for a long time. But they are even more important during this pandemic.”

Even in states where these workers are deemed essential, advocates say they are not receiving the funds the federal government has allotted for them. The CARES Act allocates $100 billion in taxpayer funds for the wider healthcare industry to combat the coronavirus pandemic. This was followed by an interim funding legislation that included an additional $75 billion, which Trump signed into law April 24th. But the home health care industry has yet to receive anything from these funds, says William Dombi, President of the National Association for Home Care and Hospice.

“Taking congressional action to say, ‘We think the money should go that way’ seems to be what is necessary at this point,” says Dombi. “While we are obviously moving at extreme speed in this pandemic… nothing has happened so far that indicates that these workers have had the respect they really deserve to have.”

In their letter to McCarthy and Pelosi, Castro and Haaland propose that protections for these workers go beyond receiving the funds already allotted and expand the federal infrastructure to help them weather the pandemic’s storm. In addition to advocating for provisions Democrats have long been touting, like the expansion of paid medical leave and affordable childcare, they are proposing grants to community organizations so they can hire more workers, and funding for transition programs for seniors and the disabled to leave institutional settings.

“The gross inequality and fragmented nature of our social safety nets and health care systems is starker than ever, and nowhere is it more glaring than in the lack of support for our nation’s caregivers,” they wrote.

The implementation of the CARES Act has not been without bumps in the road. The Paycheck Protection Program, which was designed to furnish small business with potentially forgivable loans to keep workers on payroll, ran out of money within two weeks, and outrage ensued after it was revealed that some of the funds went to large restaurant chains like Shake Shack and Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse. And while the bill expanded unemployment, millions of Americans have had trouble getting through to government offices to access the benefits.

In part to mitigate further problems as more workers seek access to a safety net that is arguably unequipped for a surge, Haaland and Castro also proposed in their letter to McCarthy and Pelosi that the government create a web portal and app for all essential workers to access and download the necessary resources and determine their eligibility for certain programs and testing. The website would be part of the broader initiative to help federal workers.

Their suggestions, even if backed by a large group of Democrats, are still far from becoming law in a Republican-led Senate. While the letter has forty seven co-sponsors, all are Democrats, even though, according to a senior Castro aide, it was circulated among both parties. Democrats pushed for expanded paid family leave provisions in the second coronavirus relief package, which preceded the CARES Act, only to see them stripped out to ensure its passage. “There is an effort [to help this group] but it’s clearly on one side of the aisle — the Democrats,” says Combi.

Both sides will need to band together for any of these ideas to actually materialize. Castro, for one, remains hopeful it will happen. “I don’t see this as a partisan issue. These people are in every congressional district in the country,” he says. “We should be able to get behind them in a bipartisan way.”

Please send tips, leads, and stories from the frontlines to virus@time.com.

Apple Is Making it Way Easier to Unlock Your iPhone While Wearing a Mask

If you’ve been having trouble unlocking your pesky iPhone while wearing a mask, you’re not alone.

As many of us are wearing facial coverings while out of the house to curb the spread of COVID-19, it’s proving difficult to use the Face ID unlocking feature in newer iPhones, like the iPhone 11. Luckily, an upcoming software update from Apple is making it easier to deal with the frustration, though not in the way you might think.

Among various bug fixes and improvements, Apple’s upcoming iOS 13.5 update includes a minor but important change to the iPhone lock screen. When you pick up a Face ID-capable iPhone, it usually prompts you to show your mug to the front-facing camera to get inside your device. Failing that, the iPhone asks you to enter your passcode — but it can take a few seconds before the passcode option appears.

With the upcoming update, iPhone users will be able to swipe up from the bottom of the lock screen to instantly jump to to the passcode option, manually and quickly bypassing Face ID. The update is currently in beta before being rolled out more widely.

Of course, using this option may mean your rarely-used passcode or uncomfortably long password will see a lot more use, which can eat up even more time. To make your passcode easier to enter (helpful when hauling groceries home) you can visit the Settings app, select Face ID & Passcode, and enter a new, shorter password. Just remember to keep it hard to guess — shorter passcodes can be easier to remember, but can also be less safe. You may also see the option to “Set Up an Alternate Appearance.” Before you get your hopes up, thinking you can just configure your iPhone to recognize you with your mask on, it unfortunately won’t work with a mask obstructing half your face.

While Apple’s Beta Program is open to everyone who wants to join, doing so isn’t recommended if your device is “mission-critical,” so to speak. Beta versions of software often contain bugs that may leave users vulnerable to glitches that could result in lost data, or exploits that have yet to be patched in that particular version. So it’s better to wait for this feature to come to the general public, which shouldn’t take long.

Are You Experiencing COVID-19 “Caution Fatigue”? Here’s What It Is, and How to Fight It

As lockdowns drag on and on in many U.S. states, there are worrying signs that people’s resolve to continue social distancing is flagging.

An illicit house party in Chicago made headlines this week, as did photos of crowded beaches in Southern California and packed parks in New York City. Anonymized cell-phone data tracked by the University of Maryland also shows more and more people are making non-work-related trips outside as quarantines drag on, and a TIME data analysis found that some states are experiencing new surges in coronavirus cases after initial declines.

Jacqueline Gollan, an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, has coined a name for this phenomenon based on her 15 years of research into depression, anxiety and decision-making: “caution fatigue.”

Gollan likens social-distancing motivation to a battery. When lockdowns were first announced, many people were charged with energy and desire to flatten the curve. Now, many weeks in, the prolonged cocktail of stress, anxiety, isolation and disrupted routines has left many people feeling drained. As motivation dips, people are growing more lax about social-distancing guidelines—and potentially putting themselves and others in harm’s way, Gollan says.

Even as some states begin the process of reopening, it’s crucial that people continue to follow local social-distancing guidelines to avoid back-sliding. To help, use Gollan’s tips for fighting caution fatigue.

Take care of your physical and mental health

You’ve heard all these tips before, but they bear repeating: get enough sleep, follow a balanced diet, exercise regularly, don’t drink too much, stay socially connected and find ways to relieve stress. “If people can address the reasons for the caution fatigue, the caution fatigue itself will improve,” Gollan says.

Gollan also says it’s important to improve your “emotional fitness.” She recommends expressing gratitude, either to others or yourself; setting goals for how you want to feel or act; and taking time just to decompress and laugh.

Reframe risks and benefits

As important as they are, goals like flattening the curve and improving public health can be hard to stay fired up about since they’re somewhat abstract, Gollan acknowledges. So it can be useful to think about how your behavior directly affects your chances of getting sick, and thus your chances of spreading the virus to people around you.

People tend to overvalue what’s already happened, assuming if they haven’t gotten sick yet they won’t in the future. “But if your behavior changes and you have a gradual decline in your safety behaviors, then the risk my increase over time,” Gollan says. Remembering that reality can prevent you from falling into “thinking traps” like convincing yourself another trip to the grocery store is absolutely necessary, when it’s really just out of boredom, Gollan says.

Rebuild your routine

Coronavirus has probably shattered your regular daily routine—but you can still make time for things you valued before the pandemic, like exercise and socializing. Creating a new normal, to the extent possible, can be stabilizing, Gollan says.

Focusing on small pieces of your new routine can also be a helpful way to grapple with uncertainty. If it’s hard for you to think about how long quarantine may stretch on, instead focus on the immediate future. “What are you going to do this morning?” Gollan says. “Are there things you’re not doing that you should?”

Make altruism a habit

It may help to remember that social-distancing is really about the common good. In keeping yourself safe, you’re also improving public health, ensuring that hospitals can meet demand and quite possibly saving lives. “There’s something powerful about hope, compassion, caring for others, altruism,” Gollan says. “Those values can help people battle caution fatigue.”

Just like anything, selfless behavior gets easier the more you do it, Gollan says. “Try small chunks of it,” she suggests. “What can you do in the next hour, or today, that’s going to be a selfless act to others?” Donating to charity or checking in on a loved one are easy places to start.

Switch up your media diet

Just as you may learn to tune out the sounds outside your window, “we get desensitized to the warnings [about coronavirus],” Gollan says. “That’s the brain adjusting normally to stimulation.” Even something as simple as checking a credible news source you don’t usually follow, or catching up on headlines from another part of the country, could help your brain reset, she says.

Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin Tests Positive for Coronavirus

(MOSCOW) — Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin says he has tested positive for the new coronavirus and has told President Vladimir Putin he will self-isolate.

First Deputy Prime Minister Andrei Belousov will temporarily perform Mishustin’s duties, but the prime minister said Thursday that he would stay in touch on key issues.

Mishustin, 54, was named prime minister in January.

During a video call, Putin voiced hope that Mishustin would continue taking part in drafting policies to shore up the Russian economy, which has been hurt by the virus pandemic. In Russia, the prime minister oversees the economy and answers to the president.

It was not immediately clear when Putin last met with Mishustin in person. The Russian president has minimized meetings and switched to holding video conferences with officials during the pandemic.

A German Photographer Captures Ordinary People Adapting to Life Under Lockdown

When Ingmar Björn Nolting saw his grandmother in early April, it was from a distance of five meters. Roswitha Erler, 80, lives in the north-eastern German town of Minden and has been battling breast cancer—putting her at high risk of severe symptoms if she catches the coronavirus. “It was strange not being able to hug her,” says Nolting, who took his grandmother’s portrait outside her home. “The next time I can do that, I’ll really appreciate it.”

Inside Erler’s doorway hangs a sign that reads “I’m staying at home.” She was born five years after World War II ended, and told Nolting that life during the coronavirus pandemic feels similar to life during the post war years: everyone must stick together and do their part to keep Germany stable.

Taking his grandmother’s photo was one of the most challenging tasks in Nolting’s latest project. For the past month, the 24-year-old photographer has been traveling around Germany under strict precautions to document how different groups of people, from medical workers to asylum seekers to couples separated by newly erected border fences, have adapted to life in lockdown and sought to find some normalcy and creativity in these times.

Ingmar Björn Nolting—DOCKS CollectiveThe closed border between the German village of Sigmarszell and the Austrian village of Hohenweiler on April 18.

Ingmar Björn Nolting—DOCKS CollectiveEaster services are held at a drive-in cinema in Düsseldorf on April 10, as church services have been prohibited throughout Germany since March 16.

Ingmar Björn Nolting—DOCKS CollectiveMohamed and Saleh, both from Syria, photographed during quarantine at a refugee reception center in Suhl on March 27. More than 500 residents in the center have been under quarantine since March 13, after one resident was confirmed to have coronavirus.

Ingmar Björn Nolting—DOCKS CollectiveEvery Sunday, members of a church brass band “Posaunenchor Essingen” play at the same time around the town Essingen, as they cannot meet in person. Andrea and Rainer Zube, pictured here on April 19, play in a meadow.

Germany recorded its first case of coronavirus on January 21. More than three months on, there have been 160,059 confirmed infections and 6,314 deaths, according to April 29 data from Johns Hopkins University. Although Germany is Europe’s second largest country, with a population of 84 million people, it has managed to keep its outbreak relatively under control compared to its neighbors. Widespread testing and strict lockdown measures have meant Germany’s death rate is far below France, Spain, Italy and the U.K., which have each lost more than 20,000 citizens.

From March 16, Germany’s public life started to shut down. The country sealed off its borders with France, Germany and Switzerland on March 16, while Chancellor Angela Merkel urged people to stay at home and banned church, synagogue and mosque services. Days later, non-essential shops and restaurants were shut and gatherings of three or more people were barred. Under Germany’s 16-state federal system, only state and local governments can impose curfews. In some states, a full curfew was introduced, banning people from leaving their homes with a few exceptions.

For Nolting, the gravity of the situation hit when Merkel gave a rare television address on March 18. “This is serious,” she said, as the number of confirmed infections hit 5,800. “Since the Second World War—no challenge to our nation has demanded such a degree of common and united action.”

“That’s when I understood it was going to be very different from everything else I’ve experienced,” Nolting says. It’s also when the 24 year old photographer decided to document how life in Germany was changing, driven by a “need to visually document this in a more comprehensive, personal way.”

Ingmar Björn Nolting—DOCKS CollectiveHospital beds are set up on April 4 at a new hospital for treating coronavirus in an exhibition hall at the Hannover Messe trade fair in Hannover. Five hundred beds will be available across two halls.

Ingmar Björn Nolting—DOCKS CollectiveMarkus Küstner, an undertaker, is seen on April 17 before a funeral in the mourning hall of a cemetery in Dachsenhausen. According to official guidelines, no more than 10 people are allowed to attend a burial and mourners must keep a distance of at least five feet from one another.

Ingmar Björn Nolting—DOCKS CollectiveMichaela Schenker and her son Lukas take a walk through a forest near the village Ellenberg on April 19. Lukas lives in a home for people with mental disabilities and was not allowed to have visitors due to the pandemic. After developing symptoms of depression, his mother was able to get a special permit that allows them to meet for a walk once a week.

Within a matter of days, ordinary life had become impossible. “It showed me how fragile our systems are, how everything can change so quickly,” Nolting says. “People are forced to be creative when they need to be and, somehow, they find ways of doing what they love.”

Among those people was American organist Cameron Carpenter. Although large gatherings of more than 1,000 people have been banned until August 31 and music venues remain closed, many musicians have found news ways of reaching their audiences. Nolting photographed Carpenter rehearsing for a concert at the Konzerthaus, a Berlin venue that hosts more than 1400 people. Carpenter, who live streamed the performance so that his audience could access it online, said the empty concert hall gave him the ability to enhance the acoustic quality.

Nolting also photographed members of a church brass band in the southern town of Essingen, who have continued playing despite being unable to meet. Since the band stopped gathering six weeks ago, they have taken to playing in different spots around town every Sunday at 10:30 a.m. — keeping their distance from one another. On April 19, for instance, members Andrea and Rainer Zube, met on a meadow in Essingen to play the french horn and trumpet.

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Ingmar Björn Nolting—DOCKS CollectiveMinakhanym Bagavova sews reusable hybrid face masks in the sewing room at the textile services company Sitex in Minden on April 8. Wearing face masks on public transport and shops became mandatory on April 27 for most people in Germany.

Ingmar Björn Nolting—DOCKS CollectiveThe entrance area of a store in Minden, Germany, April 9. German supermarkets have taken safety measures that include placing cashiers behind perspex windows and designating an employee to disinfect shopping baskets and carts at the entrance.

Ingmar Björn Nolting—DOCKS CollectiveRomanian seasonal workers, who came to Germany before the entry ban, work on an asparagus plantation near Staffelde on April 25. Despite the entry ban, the government has allowed 40,000 foreign harvest workers to come to Germany in April and another 40,000 May, in order to help plug the huge deficit of workers available. Around 100,000 foreign harvest workers are needed until the end of May.

In the southern city of Konstanz, Nolting captured scenes of friends and couples meeting a border fence that was recently created with the neighboring Swiss town of Kreuzlingen. Residents in both cities are usually able to cross the invisible line that separates Germany and Switzerland, but since the borders were shut on March 16, travel between the cities has been mostly forbidden. A couple weeks later, Swiss officials put up a second fence 1.5 meters away from the first to enforce social distancing rules, as too many people were making physical contact and passing each other objects through the fence.

Many people don’t even have the freedom to walk around their towns and cities. Throughout Germany, asylum-seekers and refugees have been confined to accommodation facilities after residents tested positive for coronavirus. Nolting visited a refugee center in the city of Suhl in central Germany, where more than 500 people were placed in quarantine on March 13 after one person tested positive for the coronavirus. When a small group of people rioted and tried to escape the center, more than 100 police and special service officers were reportedly deployed to the center on March 17.

On March 27, residents Mohamed and Saleh from Syria spoke to Nolting through a fence about the difficulties of the situation. “They said they lived through the war in Syria, so they don’t fear the virus,” Nolting says. “But there is one difference, they said, you can see the bombs. But you can’t see the virus.

Ingmar Björn Nolting—DOCKS CollectiveYoung men fool around on the banks of the river Weser in Minden on April 8. In most federal states in Germany people are allowed to move freely, while keeping a distance of at least five feet from others.

Ingmar Björn Nolting—DOCKS CollectiveCameron Carpenter rehearses before live streaming an Easter concert at the Konzerthaus Berlin concert hall on April 11. The empty concert hall offered new opportunities to position Carpenter’s tailor-made organ and loudspeakers for improved acoustic quality, something that would not have been possible with an audience present, according to Carpenter.

Ingmar Björn Nolting—DOCKS CollectiveA coronavirus drive-in test facility at the Nürtingen fairground on March 26. Germany’s weekly testing capacities were boosted to about 700,000 a week, a trade group said on April 28.

Ingmar Björn Nolting—DOCKS CollectiveRoswitha Erler, the photographer’s grandmother, who has breast cancer, shelters in her house in Minden on April 8.

A month later, at the time of publication, Nolting was in the north-western state of Westphalia, some 300 miles from his home in Saxony. He says he does not know when his project will end. It depends on how long the pandemic keeps Germany’s residents confined to their homes and accommodation facilities. As restrictions are being gradually eased, with certain shops reopening last week and some schools set to open their doors from May 4, normalcy appears to be on its way back for some, slowly.

But for Erler, it could be months before she can safely leave her home. Nolting is reassured by the amount of support she’s receiving. “It’s been nice to see my family be so caring towards her. My aunt delivers food and everything she needs to her door, we call her everyday,” Nolting says. “She’s coping well, somehow.”

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