US ECONOMY UNLIKELY TO RECOVER AS RAPIDLY AS IT COLLAPSED 06

VIRUS CASTS A DARK CLOUD OVER ONCE-THRIVING HOME MARKET 16

FEDS LOOSEN VIRUS RULES TO LET ESSENTIAL WORKERS RETURN 26

VIRUS OUTBREAK DELIVERS TECH DARLINGS A HARSH REALITY CHECK 36

PANDEMIC HAS SET THE NUMBER OF AIR TRAVELERS BACK DECADES 46

OIL-PRODUCING NATIONS SEEK GLOBAL DEAL TO STABILIZE MARKET 54

HIGHLANDS UNIVERSITY STUDENTS TO HELP MUSEUMS GO VIRTUAL 60

LOCKDOWNS MEAN MILLIONS OF WOMEN CAN’T REACH BIRTH CONTROL 62

NEW PHONE-ONLY QUIBI AIMS FOR BITE OF DIGITAL ENTERTAINMENT 72

A LOOK AT OFFERINGS ON NEW MOBILE PLATFORM QUIBI 80

MAKING PLANS, DEFIANTLY, AMID THE CHAOS AND MADNESS 94

REINVENT YOURSELF: FINDING NEW WAYS TO MAKE MONEY 104

MICROSOFT ENGINEER ADAPTS FAN-TRACKING APP FOR COVID-19 USE 120

MODELING CORONAVIRUS: ‘UNCERTAINTY IS THE ONLY CERTAINTY’ 126

CDC CONSIDERS LOOSENING GUIDELINES FOR SOME EXPOSED TO VIRUS 134

UI HOSPITAL USING VIRTUAL TECHNOLOGY TO TREAT VIRUS PATIENTS 140

LOCAL NEWSPAPERS ARE FACING THEIR OWN CORONAVIRUS CRISIS 142

MARVEL REMAKES RELEASE CALENDAR; ‘MULAN’ MOVES TO LATE JULY 150

SXSW PARTNERS WITH AMAZON TO PUT ITS FILM FESTIVAL ONLINE 154

CELEBRITIES REVEAL NEW SIDES DURING VIRUS, BUT FACE BACKLASH 158

ALASKA RESIDENTS URGED TO COMPLETE CENSUS ONLINE, BY PHONE 168

DANCING ALONE: A SENIOR CENTER KEEPS CLIENTS UP AND MOVING 172

CATCH THIS WEEK’S SUPERMOON, BIGGEST AND BRIGHTEST OF YEAR 176

AFTER VIRUS, HOW WILL AMERICANS’ VIEW OF THE WORLD CHANGE? 180

WITH NO THEATERS, FILM FANS FIND WAYS TO GATHER VIRTUALLY 188

JAPAN’S STATE OF EMERGENCY IS NO LOCKDOWN. WHAT’S IN IT? 196

BLEACHING ON GREAT BARRIER REEF MORE WIDESPREAD THAN EVER 204

6
 US ECONOMY
UNLIKELY TO
RECOVER AS
RAPIDLY AS IT
COLLAPSED

President Donald Trump has been telling voters

that the U.S. economy will leap back to life “like
a rocket,” stronger than ever after its bout with
the coronavirus.

But there is a reason economics is called the

“dismal science.” There are emerging signs that
any recovery will fail to match the speed and
severity of the economic collapse that occurred
in just a few weeks. The 2020 presidential and
Senate elections likely will take place as the
world’s largest economy is still attempting to
climb back from the deadly outbreak.
“Anyone who assumes we’re going to get a
sharp snapback in activity isn’t thinking about
how consumers are going to feel. They’re going

7
8
to be very cautious,” said Nariman Behravesh,
chief economist at IHS Markit. “Households and
businesses have seen their finances deteriorate.
People are buying groceries on their credit cards.”

To understand the consequences of a sudden

negative shock on the economy, Behravesh
studied how many people returned to flying
after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

“It took two and a half years for airline passenger

traffic to go back to previous levels,” he said.

No longer able to campaign on a half-century

low unemployment rate, Trump has begun
to tell voters that he can quickly rebuild the
economy. He said measures like the $2.2 trillion
rescue package — with more money likely on
the way — can send employment and economic
growth to new highs.

Jefrey Pollock, a Democratic pollster, said voters

will judge in November whether the Republican
president has delivered an economic revival,
and they will be taking a similar measure of
incumbent members of Congress.

“The fact that we’re as partisan as ever doesn’t

mean we’re destined to forgive a president who
fails on the economy,” Pollock said. “This is a man
who championed his economic abilities — and
to me there is nothing to suggest that voters will
forgive him, since he’s been front and center on
the virus response since Day One.”
If his view holds, that plays to the advantage of
likely Democratic nominee Joe Biden. But Biden
will have to give voters a fuller idea of how he
would boost the economy, Pollock said.

Trump has repeatedly sought to portray the

situation as the U.S. economy being sideswiped

9
10
by the “hidden enemy” of COVID-19, which
he and his advisers initially downplayed in
February and March and later suggested was
impossible to foresee. His message to voters
is that his leadership will make the economy
even stronger.

“Our Economy will BOOM, perhaps like never

before!!!” Trump declared Wednesday on Twitter.

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, who has

been leading the stimulus efforts, has said there
will be “a very big bounce back,” though he
noted that the gains could be uneven.
“Certain parts of the economy you’re going
to see come back immediately,” Mnuchin said
Tuesday on the Fox Business Network. “Certain
things are going to take a little bit longer.”

One of the arguments for a quick recovery

came from the Harvard University economist
Larry Summers, who served as a top economic
adviser to President Barack Obama during the
Great Recession, suggesting on Twitter that the
U.S. economy would behave much as a beach
town on Cape Cod, which closes in the winter
and reopens around Memorial Day for a burst of
summer activity.

Adding to the challenge is that political leaders

cannot simply command an economic recovery
to occur. The timing depends on the shared
actions of millions of consumers and employers,
said Paul Winfree, a former Trump White House
official who is now director of economic policy
at the conservative Heritage Foundation.
“I don’t think we’re going to get out of this
because of political leadership,” Winfree said in
an email. “This isn’t WWII. Rather, things won’t

11
turn around until a significant majority of people
decide that we’ve done enough (privately and
publicly) and have to move along. Hopefully,
that coincides with the success of public
health efforts.”
A strong economic rebound likely depends on
people and companies being able to preserve
their money, so that it can be spent and
invested once the gloom begins to subside. The
challenge now is that incomes are eroding, and
that could limit the recovery.

Not only have 16.8 million Americans —

roughly 1 in 10 workers — lost their jobs in
the past three weeks. Workers have seen their
hours slashed, have seen sales commissions
disappear and have accepted salary cuts, such
that incomes have declined for half of U.S.
working households, according to a survey from
The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public
Affairs Research.
Children can no longer attend school, reducing
the productivity of their parents. And on a
regional basis, many state economies may take
time to claw back what has been lost. Florida will
need to bring back roughly 130 million tourists
annually. The decisions of Texas employers will
likely depend on crude oil — now trading for
around a low $24 a barrel — climbing back
above $30 to a point at which drilling and
pumping is profitable.
Stanford University economist Nicholas Bloom
is an expert on uncertainty and believes
the economy will end this year 10% smaller
than it was at the start of 2020, a loss of
nearly $2 trillion even with the $2.2 trillion
rescue package.

12
13
The long-term outlook also has deteriorated, he
added, in ways that could hurt the recovery.
“Working from home is creating a collapse
in investment,” Bloom said. “All firms I have
spoken to have cancelled training, new product
introductions and R&D projects, while at U.S.
universities and laboratories unless you are
working on COVID-19 you have stopped work.
So innovation — the main driver of long-run U.S.
growth — has stopped.”

Bloom has personally responded to the

decline in an ominous way. He said he pulled
his retirement funds and college savings from
the stock market and placed them in interest-
bearing accounts to wait out the storm.

14
15
16
 VIRUS CASTS
A DARK
CLOUD OVER
ONCE-THRIVING
HOME MARKET

When Rebeka McBride and her husband put

their home in Washington state on the market in
early March, the coronavirus outbreak was just
taking hold in the United States. They managed
to hold two open houses and a smattering of
private viewings before accepting an offer.

But with the U.S. economy now collapsing, the

family is less confident about their move to a
Minneapolis suburb, where McBride sees brighter
job prospects in her field of medical device
research. She worries that their buyer will pull out
before closing. And for her own new home, she’s
using virtual tours but isn’t inclined to make an
offer without seeing a home in person. Worse,
McBride is suddenly worried about job prospects
amid mass layoffs, forcing a reassessment of what
she and her husband can afford.

17
18
“I’m nervous the layoffs and change in economy
will cause the bottom to fall out,” said McBride,
the mother of a 4-year-old.
McBride is among many sellers and buyers, in
the United States as well as in Europe, caught
in the grip of a pandemic that has upended the
housing market just as it was entering the busy
spring season.

Shutdown orders have halted open houses

and complicated property viewings. Sellers are
delaying listings or yanking their properties off
the market. Prospective buyers are dropping
out, some of them after losing jobs.

Agents are turning to virtual tours, electronic

signatures and “drive-through” closings, where
paperwork is completed through car windows.
Where it’s still allowed, buyers and agents are
entering homes separately, armed with hand
sanitizers and wipes.

Mortgage applications to buy a home fell 12%

in the week that ended April 3 compared with
the previous week — and were a stunning
33% lower than in the same week last year, the
Mortgage Bankers Association reported. Home
buying applications are at their lowest level
since 2015, the MBA said.
The mortgage industry itself is reeling as
hundreds of thousands of Americans have
temporarily stopped paying their mortgages
under the federal coronavirus relief bill. The
MBA is among several housing industry groups
that have called for federal aid for mortgage
servicers, who handle paperwork for lenders.
A collapse of sales could trigger a series of
reactions that would further damage the
economy. Further declines will mean fewer

19
20
purchases at furniture and appliance stores.
If construction stalls, 3 million homebuilding
jobs are at risk. So are many brokers: Redfin
plans to furlough 41% of its brokers. Zillow has
suspended home buying in all 24 of it markets.
Other brokerages have canceled open houses.

Listings of homes for sale were already near

historic lows before the virus struck. Further
squeezing supply, at least five states, including
hard-hit New York, Michigan and Washington,
have banned most construction of new
properties as part of stay-at-home orders,
according to the National Association of Home
Builders. De-listings of homes for sale jumped
100% year-over-year for the week that ended
April 3, according to Redfin.

“People are losing their jobs,” said Taylor Marr,

the company’s chief economist. “If they were
looking for a home and they were working in a
restaurant, that is probably no longer the case.”
In Britain, the latest monthly data have yet to be
released, but anecdotal evidence suggests that
the market has come to a standstill.

“People are holding off, obviously, waiting

for everything to pass,” said Simon Kyriacou,
a London branch director for property
agency EweMove.

Real estate consultants Knight Frank have

forecast that sales across the U.K. this year will
fall 38% from 2019.
In the U.S., the long-term outlook is shrouded in
uncertainty. A staggering rise in unemployment
and the stock market decline is diminishing buying
power. In Massachusetts, purchases had surged
more than 25% as recently as February compared

21
with a year earlier, according to Kurt Thompson of
the Massachusetts Association of Realtors.
The biggest pullback is occurring among
casual buyers and sellers, whose caution is
exacerbating the predicament for people who
feel compelled to move. Consider Marc Okicich,
who’s been trying to move his wife and two
daughters to San Diego, where he’s lived since
November after a job transfer. The family put
their Chicago-area house on the market in
February. It finally fetched one offer last week.
The two sides reached agreement Sunday for
$8,000 below the asking price.

In New York City, where the virus has hit hardest,

property visits have all but stopped. Michael J.
Franco, an agent with Compass, said one of the
only transactions he’s made the past two weeks
occurred when the owners of an Manhattan
apartment who’d been trying to sell it decided
to rent it out instead.
Cara Ameer, an agent in northeast Florida,
has been driving around to make video tours
for several clients facing urgent moves. One
must move from New Mexico because of a job
change but has been forced the virus outbreak
to postpone a house hunting trip. Another
from Colorado made an offer on one of Ameer’s
homes, sight unseen, deciding the video was
good enough.

But for the majority of buyers, virtual tours

aren’t enough, even if they can help narrow
their options.
“People need to touch, people need to smell the
place, people need to see the neighborhood,”
said Lawrence Yun, chief economist of the
National Association of Realtors.

22
23
Closings have grown more complicated.
Equipped with gloves, sanitizer, masks and
shopping bags for her feet for a private showing,
real estate agent Michele Messina has had to
innovate in the face of a stay-at-home order in
New Jersey.

She did a recent closing in which the

buyer visited a home alone, and the two
communicated via Whatsapp for the walk-
through. Messina also is starting to have clients
bring their own pens to signings and requiring
everyone to wait in their cars while a title
company representative passes paperwork
through the window of each vehicle — a drive-
through closing, as she calls it.

“We created it out of necessity,” she said. “You

can’t have people sitting around the table.”

24
25
FEDS LOOSEN
VIRUS RULES TO
LET ESSENTIAL
WORKERS
RETURN

In a first, small step toward reopening the

country, the Trump administration issued new
guidelines Wednesday to make it easier for
essential workers who have been exposed to
COVID-19 to get back to work if they do not
have symptoms of the coronavirus.
Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention, announced
at the White House that essential employees,
such as health care and food supply workers,
who have been within 6 feet of a confirmed or
suspected case of the virus can return to work
under certain circumstances if they are not
experiencing symptoms.
The new guidelines are being issued as the
nation mourns more than 14,000 deaths from
the virus and grapples with a devastated

26
Image: Alex Brandon
27
28
economy and medical crises from coast to coast.
Health experts continue to caution Americans to
practice social distancing and to avoid returning
to their normal activities. At the same time,
though, they are planning for a time when the
most serious threat from COVID-19 will be in the
country’s rear-view mirror.
President Donald Trump said that while he knows
workers are “going stir crazy” at home, he can’t
predict when the threat from the virus will wane.
“The numbers are changing and they’re
changing rapidly and soon we’ll be over that
curve. We’ll be over the top and we’ll be headed
in the right direction. I feel strongly about that,”
Trump said about the coronavirus, which he
called “this evil beast.”
“I can’t tell you in terms of the date,” Trump said,
adding cases could go down and then once
again “start going up if we’re not careful. ”
At some point, he said at his daily briefing, social
distancing guidelines will disappear and people
will be able to sit together at sports events. “At
some point we expect to be back, like it was
before,” he said.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious
disease expert, said if the existing guidelines
asking people to practice social distancing
through the end of April are successful in
halting the spread of the virus, more relaxed
recommendations could be in order.
He said the White House task force was trying to
dovetail public health concerns with practical
steps that need to be in place when the 30-day
guidelines end at the end of the month so the
nation can “safely and carefully march toward
some sort of normality.”

29
If, by fall, things start to return to normal,
Americans will still need to wash their hands
frequently, sick schoolchildren should be kept
home and people with fevers need to refrain
from going to work, Fauci said during an online
interview Wednesday with the editor of the
Journal of the American Medical Association.
People also should never shake hands again,
Fauci said, only half-jokingly.
“I mean it sounds crazy, but that’s the way it’s
really got to be,” he said. “Until we get to a point
where we know the population is protected”
with a vaccine.
Under the new guidelines for essential workers,
the CDC recommends that exposed employees
take their temperatures before their shifts, wear
face masks and practice social distancing at
work. They also are advised to stay home if they
are ill, not share headsets or other objects used
near the face and refrain from congregating in
crowded break rooms.
Employers are asked to take exposed workers’
temperatures and assess symptoms before
allowing them to return to work, aggressively
clean work surfaces, send workers home if they
get sick and increase air exchange in workplaces.
Fauci said he hoped the pandemic would
prompt the U.S. to look at long-term
investments in public health, specifically at the
state and local level. Preparedness that was
not in place in January needs to be in place if
or when COVID-19 or another virus threatens
the country.
“We have a habit of whenever we get over a
challenge, we say, ‘OK, let’s move on to the
current problem,’” he said. “We should never,

30
31
32
ever be in a position of getting hit like this
and have to scramble to respond again. This
is historic.”
Even the new guidelines will not be a foolproof
guard against spreading infection.
Recent studies have suggested that somewhere
around 10% of new infections might be sparked
by contact with individuals who are infected
but do not yet exhibit symptoms. Scientists say
it’s also possible that some people who develop
symptoms and then recover from the virus
remain contagious, or that some who are infected
and contagious may never develop symptoms.
On the other side of the globe, the journey back
to normalcy is further along.
In Wuhan, the Chinese industrial city that
first reported cases of the new coronavirus,
authorities ended a 76-day lockdown
Wednesday. Residents can travel in and out of
the city without special authorization, but must
use a smartphone app showing they are healthy
and have not been in recent contact with
anyone confirmed to have the virus.
Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, chimed
in with a cautionary tweet from the sidelines,
writing: “Social distancing bends the curve and
relieves some pressure on our heroic medical
professionals. But in order to shift off current
policies, the key will be a robust system of
testing and monitoring — something we have
yet to put in place nationwide.”
Conservative voices, for their part, are pushing
for an economic and social restart, urging Trump
to overrule health officials.
“At some point, the president is going to have to
look at Drs. Fauci and Birx and say, we’re opening

33
on May 1,” Fox commentator Laura Ingraham
tweeted. “Give me your best guidance on
protocols, but we cannot deny our people their
basic freedoms any longer.”
For most people, the new coronavirus causes
mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and
cough that clear up in two to three weeks. For
some, especially older adults and people with
existing health problems, it can cause more
severe illness, including pneumonia, and death.

34
35
VIRUS OUTBREAK
DELIVERS TECH
DARLINGS A
HARSH REALITY
CHECK

Just as the coronavirus outbreak has boxed

in society, it’s also squeezed high-flying tech
companies reliant on people’s freedom to move
around and get together.
Since the beginning of March, for instance, Uber
shares have lost a quarter of their value. Rival
Lyft is down 28 percent. Over the same period,
the S&P 500 has fallen just 10 percent, even
with wild swings along the way. The picture is
even less clear for other, still-private “unicorn”
companies once valued at more than $1 billion,
such as Airbnb and WeWork.
“What market pressure will mean for all
companies is survival of the fittest,” said Allen
Adamson, co-founder of the marketing firm
Metaforce and a business professor at New York
University. “If you are going into this storm in a
bad shape, it’s not going to be pretty.”

36
37
38
Just few weeks ago, Airbnb was poised to
cash in on a soaring stock market with its
highly anticipated public offering. But with the
market now reeling and few people looking
to anywhere but home, Airbnb is reportedly
racking up millions of dollars in losses while
fending off a backlash from hosts who rely on its
service to survive.
Hosts were furious when the company told
guests they could cancel their stays without
penalties. Last week, Airbnb agreed to pay hosts
$250 million to make up for some of the money
lost to cancellations.
AirDNA, a data firm that helps property owners
set rental rates, says the impact on U.S. Airbnb
hosts has been mixed. In New York City,
bookings dropped 66% in March, but in outer
suburbs they were up as people fled the city.
Bookings in Westhampton Beach, N.Y., jumped
sixfold. Similarly, bookings in the city of Chicago
fell 11% last month, but in St. Joseph, Michigan
— a lakeside community within driving distance
— they were up by a factor of four.
Cary Gillenwater, who has an attached guest
suite in Amsterdam listed on Airbnb, said 20
guests have canceled reservations between
March and June, costing him nearly $11,000. He
had hoped for compensation from the company,
but was told that only reservations canceled
through Airbnb that specifically mentioned the
coronavirus would qualify. Several of his would-
be guests contacted him directly to cancel; he
refunded their money, but may be out of luck
when it comes to reimbursement. Airbnb didn’t
immediately respond to a request for comment.
The company got a lifeline of sorts on Monday,
when two private equity firms — Silver Lake and

39
Sixth Street Partners — invested $1 billion in
debt and equity in the company. The firms say
the expect Airbnb to emerge from the crisis in a
stronger position.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday,
however, that the company will pay interest
of more than 10% on those loans and that it
has made a “verbal commitment” to reduce
fixed costs and to bring in supplemental
management — terms that often mean
layoffs and other cost-cutting. Airbnb didn’t
immediately respond to a request for comment
on the Journal report.
Uber, meanwhile, is trying to reassure jittery
investors than its aggressive expansion plans
for ride-hailing remain on track. Like its rival
Lyft, it has seen ride demand hit a wall as states
ratchet up stay-at-home orders. Both companies
are trying to conserve cash so they can weather
the pandemic’s fallout, in part by emphasizing
deliveries of food and other goods.
Even in its worst-case scenario -- an 80% decline
in ridership through 2020 -- the company said it
would end the year with $4 billion in cash. That
would still mean burning through almost $7
billion this year, which could create problems for
Uber’s larger ambitions such as self-driving cars
and air taxis.
Analysts, however, remain largely bullish. “We
believe both Uber and Lyft will come out the
other side still well placed to capture growth
and opportunity,” said Wedbush Securities
analyst Daniel Ives.
Drivers are another story. San Diegan Christopher
Chandler, who’s been driving for both companies
for two years, said he’s lost more than 80% of his
income since riders all but vanished. “I’m going to

40
41
42
have to make some hard choices about what bills
I won’t pay this month,” said Chandler, who has
switched to deliveries that don’t come close to
covering his former ride income.
Other lesser-known companies, however, have
benefited from the pandemic. Zoom, the video
conferencing provider, has seen its stock soar to
new highs in recent weeks; shares have nearly
quadrupled compared to their IPO price just 11
months ago.
Not so long ago, the meal-kit maker Blue Apron
was threatened with delisting from the New York
Stock Exchange after its shares fell below the
exchange minimum of $1. Since the beginning
of March, however, company shares have more
than tripled after it reported a sharp increase in
consumer demand fueled by stay-at-home orders.
CB Insights lists more than 450 startups
worldwide valued at $1 billion or more. While
it can be hard to paint these unicorns with a
broad brush because of their variety of business
models and leadership styles, co-founder and
CEO Anand Sanwal said that what COVID-19
is doing to the economy will be “tough for any
company to weather, startup or not.”
Sanwal said he’s already seeing a decline in
early-stage seed investments that help launch
new tech startups. But he said investors who
have poured big sums into unicorn startups will
likely try to do what they can to help keep them
healthy, at the very least by grooming them for
sale rather than standing by as they collapse.
“Investors are going to make some hard
decisions about whether this is a temporary
downturn, or a company that doesn’t have a
shot,” he said.

43
PANDEMIC HAS
SET THE NUMBER
OF AIR TRAVELERS
BACK DECADES

46
The number of Americans getting on airplanes
has sunk to a level not seen in more than 60
years as people shelter in their homes to avoid
catching or spreading the new coronavirus.
The Transportation Security Administration
screened fewer than 100,000 people on Tuesday,
a drop of 95% from a year ago.
The official tally of 97,130 people who passed
through TSA checkpoints exaggerates the
number of travelers – if that is possible –
because it includes some airline crew members
and people still working at shops inside airport
security perimeters.
Historical daily numbers only go back so far,
but the nation averaged 97,000 passengers a
day in 1954, according to figures from trade
group Airlines for America. It was the dawn of
the jet age. The de Havilland Comet, the first
commercial jetliner, was just a few years old, and
Boeing was running test flights with the jet that
would become the iconic 707.

47
As air travel became safer and more affordable,
the passenger numbers grew nearly every year.
There was no commercial air travel in the U.S.
for several days after the terror attacks on Sept.
11, 2001, and people were slow to get back on
planes in following months.
It could be longer this time. Polling firm Public
Opinion Strategies said that fewer than half the
Americans it surveyed about 10 days ago say
they will get on a plane within six months of the
spread of the virus flattening.

48
49
TSA, which was created after the 9/11 attacks, has
been chronicling the plunge in air traffic, posting
numbers on how many people its officers screen
each day. On March 1, it was nearly 2.3 million —
almost the same as a year earlier. The one-way
roller coaster ride — a sheer downward scream
— began in the second week of March and
slowed only in the last several days, when there
wasn’t much more room to drop.
“The falloff is amazing to see,” said Henry
Harteveldt, a travel industry analyst. “The good
news is that it shows people are taking shelter-
in-place orders seriously.”
Some of the people still traveling are health
care professionals on their way to pandemic hot
spots such as New York, where they will help in
the treatment of COVID-19 patients. A few are
traveling to be with family.
The nation’s largest flight attendant union, which
is worried about the safety of its members who
are still flying, is demanding that the government
ban all leisure travel. Representatives at several
airlines said they don’t know how many leisure
travelers are left, since they don’t routinely ask
people why they are flying.

50
51
Airlines have drastically cut the number of flights
to match demand and save cash, but even with
far fewer flights, most seats are empty.
United Airlines says it is losing $100 million a
day. Delta Air Lines says it is burning through
$60 million a day. All the leading U.S. carriers
have applied for federal grants to cover payroll
costs through September and some are likely to
seek federal loans or loan guarantees.
Even if they get taxpayer help, the airlines
warn, they will be smaller on the other side of
the pandemic.
The recovery in air travel — whenever it occurs
— could depend on many factors including
social-distancing rules and the state of the
economy, which is staggering with 10 million
people filing new claims for unemployment
benefits in the last two weeks.
Air travel is much more affordable and accessible
to the masses than it was in the 1960s. Still,
both leisure and business travelers have above-
average incomes.
“Theoretically, these consumers should be
better-positioned financially to be able to
travel again,” Harteveldt said, “but we are seeing
people at all income levels and all ages affected
by job loss or reduction in hours or working for
companies that have closed.”

52
53
OIL-PRODUCING
NATIONS SEEK
GLOBAL DEAL TO
STABILIZE MARKET

54
Oil-producing countries including those of the
OPEC cartel and Russia are trying to strike a global
deal to pump less crude in a bid to limit a crash
in prices that, while welcome for consumers, has
been straining government budgets and pushed
energy companies toward bankruptcy.
Thursday’s videoconference is part of a series
of talks on stabilizing a market, where oil prices
have more than halved since the start of the
year amid a pricing war between Saudi Arabia
and Russia. The drop was intensified when the
coronavirus pandemic caused a further plunge
in the demand for oil as travel and business
ground to a halt globally.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said
Thursday that Russia will advocate for a
coordinated move that not only includes
OPEC and Russia, which had coordinated
production cuts for four years until they fell

55
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out spectacularly this year, but also the United
States. The U.S. is the world’s top producer now
and the slide in crude prices is causing huge
financial damage to companies in the oil patch.
Expectations are high.
President Donald Trump has said that output
could be cut by as much as 15 million barrels a
day, or about 15% of global production, though
experts say that is unlikely. Last week, President
Vladimir Putin said he supported an overall cut
of about 10 million barrels a day.
“We are ready for agreements with partners and
within the framework of this mechanism - OPEC-
plus — and we are ready for cooperation with the
United States of America on this issue,” Putin said.
“According to preliminary estimates, I think that
we can talk about a reduction in the volume
of about 10 million barrels per day, a little less,
maybe a little more,” he added.

57
The oil market was already oversupplied when
Russia and OPEC failed to agree on output cuts
in early March. Analysts say Russia refused to
back even a moderate cut because it would
have only served to help U.S. energy companies,
which were pumping at full capacity. Stalling
served to hurt American shale-oil producers and
protect market share.
Russia’s move appeared to enrage Saudi Arabia,
which not only said it would not cut production
on its own but said it would increase output
instead and reduce its selling prices in what
became effectively a global pricing war.
In the time since, prices have collapsed.

58
International benchmark Brent crude traded
Thursday over $34 a barrel as the U.S. benchmark
West Texas crude traded under $27. That is just
over 50% lower than at the start of the year. At
one point, prices were down about 60%.
In Russia, which relies on oil as the main source
of income, the price collapse caused ruble to
crash, which in turn boosted the cost of imports
and sped up inflation.
Russia’s Energy Ministry said Wednesday it is
prepared to cut production by 1.6 million barrels
a day, about 14% of its overall production, under
an OPEC+ deal.

59
HIGHLANDS
UNIVERSITY
STUDENTS TO
HELP MUSEUMS
GO VIRTUAL

New Mexico Highlands University students are

working with state officials to bring online visitors
to New Mexico museums later this spring.
The university announced this week students
in the school’s Media Arts and Technology
Department are offering a free month of
emergency cultural services to help create virtual
tours, podcasts, websites, and online collections.
Cultural Technology Internship program director
Lauren Addario says the New Mexico Museum
of Art, the Museum of International Folk Art,
and the National Hispanic Cultural Center are
among the cultural institutions that have shown
interest in working with Highlands media arts
and technology students.

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61
LOCKDOWNS
MEAN MILLIONS
OF WOMEN
CAN’T REACH
BIRTH CONTROL

The callers were in tears. One by one, women in

homes across rural Zimbabwe had a pleading
question: When would family planning
services return?
Lockdowns imposed to curb the coronavirus’
spread have put millions of women in Africa,
Asia and elsewhere out of reach of birth control
and other sexual and reproductive health needs.
Confined to their homes with their husbands
and others, they face unwanted pregnancies
and little idea of when they can reach the
outside world again.
In these uncertain times, women “have to lock
down their uterus,” Abebe Shibru, Zimbabwe
country director for Marie Stopes International,
told The Associated Press. “But there is no way in
a rural area.”
Eighteen countries in Africa have imposed
national lockdowns, according to the Africa

62
Image: Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi
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64
Image: Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. All

but essential workers or those seeking food or
health care must stay home for weeks, maybe
longer. Rwanda, the first country in sub-Saharan
Africa to impose a lockdown, has extended it for
two weeks, a possible sign of things to come.
Even where family planning remains available,
providers say many women fear venturing out
and being beaten by security forces and accused
of defying the new restrictions. Meanwhile,
outreach services, the key to reaching rural
women, have largely stopped to avoid drawing
crowds and the risk of workers spreading the
virus from one community to another.
The International Planned Parenthood
Federation, or IPPF, in a new report Thursday
says more than one in five member clinics
around the world have closed because of the
pandemic and related restrictions. More than
5,000 mobile clinics across 64 countries have
closed. Most are in South Asia and Africa, but
Latin America and Europe have seen hundreds
of closures as well.
From Pakistan to Germany to Colombia, IPPF
members say they have scaled down HIV testing
and gender-based violence response work and
face shortages of contraceptives.
“They have needs that cannot wait,” IPPF
director-general Alvaro Bermejo said of
women in a statement, pleading for help from
national governments to help provide personal
protective equipment to allow for intimate care.
For most people, the coronavirus causes mild to
moderate symptoms such as fever and cough.
But for some, especially older adults and the
infirm, it can cause pneumonia and death.

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Image: Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi

In Europe, 100 non-governmental groups on

Wednesday called on governments to ensure
reproductive health services during the
pandemic, saying many facilities have sharply
reduced them or shut down.
The predicted baby boom in Africa alone, even
as birth rates have dropped in many countries as
more girls are educated, will add to the growth
that already is projected to see the continent of
1.3 billion people double in population by 2050.
In Zimbabwe, Marie Stopes provided more than
400,000 women last year with family planning
services, Shibru said, including averting
nearly 50,000 unsafe abortions. But now the
organization’s outreach services, which reach
more than 60% of clients, are suspended. Even
at clinics that remain open, the number of
clients has dropped by 70%.
That leaves a country of men, no longer free to
work in the fields or elsewhere, and without the
distraction of sports, confined with their wives
for weeks on end.
“Husband and wife, what else can they be doing
in that house?” asked Future Gwena, a Marie
Stopes outreach worker. “I think we’re going to
have a lot of pregnancies and, unfortunately,
unintended. And most will result in unsafe
abortions, domestic violence. Our community
is paternalistic. If something goes wrong in the
home, it’s the mother’s fault, even if the man
initiated it.”
Even in normal times, the average woman
seeking contraception must get consent from
her husband, Shibru said.
Meanwhile, travel restrictions and
manufacturing slowdowns in Asia as a result

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 of the pandemic mean that some family
planning providers are waiting for shipments of
emergency contraceptives and other items as
stocks run short at home.
“Today I expected a shipment from Asia, but it’s
suspended,” Shibru said. “I don’t know how to
fill that gap. It was supposed to come today to
serve us for the coming six months. So this is
one of the tragedies. ... We’re expecting a huge
shortage of contraceptives in African countries.
Absolutely, condoms also.”
In Uganda, Marie Stopes country director Carole
Sekimpi said they don’t know when a shipment
of emergency contraceptives will arrive because
India, their source, has also locked down.
They’ve been out of stock for a month and need
oral contraceptive pills as well, she said.
“Yesterday when I heard (neighboring) Kenya
talking about a lockdown in Nairobi and (the port
of) Mombasa I thought, ‘My god, what’s going
to happen to all of our shipments?’” she said.
“Overall, there’s definitely going to be a problem.”
She worried about the girls and women
confined in homes with potential assailants,
even uncles or cousins. Her organization has
suspended outreach, which provides about 40%
of services, and clinics that remain open have
seen a drop in client traffic of about 20%.
“We don’t see you anymore,” anxious callers say.
“What’s happening?”
Even the capital, Kampala, has been affected.
Sekimpi said she visited a large government-run
hospital there on Monday, “but when I got there
my heart was broken because the one service
suspended was family planning. With good
reason, because it’s usually crowded.”

Image: Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi

69
She expects not only a baby boom but a rise in
unsafe abortions and post-abortion care, along
with panicky women seeking to remove their
IUD (intrauterine device) or birth control implant
earlier than expected as they fear no family
planning worker will be around to help them later.
Even the U.S. Embassy in Uganda has taken note
of the challenges women face, tweeting that
“Periods don’t pause for pandemics” and sharing
advice on how to make washable sanitary pads
at home.
The range of issues is similar across Africa, Shibru
in Zimbabwe said, citing a daily call with country
directors in Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Madagascar
and elsewhere.
“Look, everything has been diverted to COVID,” he
said of the disease caused by the coronavirus. “But
after COVID, another catastrophe will be women’s
health, unless something is done right now.”

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72
 NEW PHONE-ONLY
QUIBI AIMS FOR
BITE OF DIGITAL
ENTERTAINMENT

Want to see Chance the Rapper prank

Hollywood stars? Catch a new action thriller
starring Liam Hemsworth and Christoph
Waltz? How about a six-minute edition of “60
Minutes”? There’s an app for that, and more.

Quibi — a snappy amalgam of “quick” and

“bite” — is a mobile phone-only platform
that will release its snack-sized installments
of movies and TV shows each weekday. There
will be seven-day-a-week dollops of news,
sports and weather, gathered under the
umbrella name Daily Essentials, all adding
up to a mind-boggling 175-plus programs
planned for this year.

73
It launches Monday in the U.S. and Canada
with a 90-day free trial and 50 programs, all
in segments no longer than 10 minutes.
They include “Punk’d,” with Chance the
Rapper as host and executive producer; the
Hemsworth-Waltz movie “Most Dangerous
Game,” and “Chrissy’s Court,” with Chrissy
Teigen administering justice in small claims
cases a la Judge Judy.

Others who have signed on to either produce

or appear (or both) in Quibi content include
Reese Witherspoon, Joe Jonas, Jennifer Lopez,
Lena Waithe and Sophie Turner.

But the biggest names attached to the project

are its executives: entertainment industry
heavyweight Jeffrey Katzenberg and former
Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman. In the
1980s, Katzenberg revived the Walt Disney
Co.’s movie studio and its animation division
with hits including “The Little Mermaid,” and
in 1994 co-founded DreamWorks SGK with
Steven Spielberg and David Geffen. Quibi
is Katzenberg’s brainchild, and he picked
Whitman, also a onetime Disney executive,
as the new platform’s CEO.

For Katzenberg, it’s the product that will

make Quibi a winner.

“In all my years, there is one rule that has never

failed, ever,” he said. “Which is, when I had my
hands on great content, whether it was an
animation and movies, .... whether it was TV
shows, a Broadway show, a novel, anything
that I had ever had in my orbit that was really
good, it’s never not worked.”

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75
There are serious believers. Quibi raised $1
billion in funding in 2018 from investors
including Disney, NBCUniversal and Viacom,
and announced another $750 million in a
second fundraising round that closed earlier
this month.

After the initial free window (the company’s

response to the coronavirus crisis) Quibi will
cost $4.99 a month with advertising or $7.99
for an ad-free version.

Because the company ramped up production

in light of a possible writers strike last
summer, Katzenberg said, it got ahead of
the pandemic-caused shutdown of TV and
film production. Quibi is on track for new
releases through October or November under
current circumstances.

It enters a marketplace crowded with new and

existing streamers also vying for consumer
dollars, including the upcoming HBO Max. And
then, of course, there’s YouTube, awash with
short-form programming minus a price tag and
with a hold on the same young-adult audience
that Quibi is after.
Quibi’s core business model “faces some
headwinds given its focus on short-form
videos, with the Goliath YouTube front and
center,” said analyst Dan Ives of Wedbush
Securities. “Betting against Katzenberg has not
worked out well for skeptics over his career,” he
added, but he sees an uphill battle for the new
platform to succeed.
Katzenberg pushes back at the idea that
Quibi, with its A-list talent and the big
screen-worthy quality of its movies, can be
undercut by YouTube.

76
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78
“Please name me a single widely distributed,
widely consumed product, that when
somebody came along and offered a better
version, a more convenient version, or a
premium version or a luxury version, that
there wasn’t some group of people that went,
‘Yeah,’” he said.
It was the rise of YouTube and smartphone-
streamed video that prompted Katzenberg’s
interest in the creative and business
opportunities they represented. He also
drew inspiration from contemporary novels
with chapters as brief as a few pages so that,
as one bestselling writer put it, readers with
just a few minutes to spare would still enjoy a
complete experience.

“We’re doing movies the way Dan Brown did

“‘The Da Vinci Code,’” Katzenberg said.

Quibi’s unique selling point is its Turnstyle

technology, developed under Whitman’s
direction, which allows users to switch
between portrait and landscape viewing
and always get a full-screen image minus the
annoying black bar. The patented Turnstyle’s
payoff for creators is how it can enhance
storytelling — for instance, viewers can be
given the option to shift a movie scene to
the character’s perspective by flipping from
horizontal to a vertical display.

“I’m confident we’re going to give people

something they’ve never seen before,”
Katzenberg said. “They will decide if they’re
going to value that enough to want to pay
for it.”

79
80
 A LOOK AT
OFFERINGS ON
NEW MOBILE
PLATFORM QUIBI

Quibi may specialize in small, bite-sized videos,

but its volume of shows is large. The media
platform launches Monday with 175 new
original shows — everything from scripted
series, comedic diversions, deep dramas and
celebrity fluff. Here’s a look at some of the
notable and less notable shows.

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MOST DANGEROUS GAME
Liam Hemsworth stars as a father-to-be with
huge bills and a terminal illness in this high-
end thrilling series that feels like watching a
big-budget film. Christoph Waltz plays a man
with an intriguing offer for our hero: Be prey
for a bunch of hunters and leave your wife and
child millions. The idea of hunting humans for
sport has a long history, and this series comes
just a few weeks after the clunky film “The
Hunt” was released. But this Quibi version is
a masterclass in how the medium can create
gripping yet tiny chapters.

83
SURVIVE
Each episode of this very adult and harrowing
tale is engrossing and perfectly paced. Sophie
Turner stars as a young woman with suicidal
tendencies who survives a plane crash and fights
to stay alive in a snowy wasteland alongside
another passenger played by Corey Hawkins. It
looks and feels like prestige Hollywood fare, and
Turner is superb as a woman haunted by her
own illness.

#FREERAYSHAWN
This engrossing crime drama centers on a fast
food worker who we meet zooming through the
back streets of New Orleans with what seems
like every city officer on his tail. He’s been set
up by police on a drug deal and takes refuge
inside his apartment building with his girlfriend
and child. Each episode is tense and raw, with
references to Black Lives Matter and a nod to the
power of social media. It stars Stephan James
as Rayshawn and an understated Laurence
Fishburne as a sympathetic beat cop. The show
is like a bag of chips: You can’t stop after just a
few episodes.

84
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PUNK’D
Seeing the rich and famous get pranked is
always fun and it gets next level in a revival of
“Punk’d.” Old host Ashton Kutcher has been
replaced by Chance the Rapper, whose easy
charm and good-natured humor is a key reason
this series works. Some of the elaborate set-ups
include Megan Thee Stallion frightened by a
gorilla, performer Sabrina Carpenter finding her
home infested by rats, and internet phenom Liza
Koshy destroying a bat mitzvah. Other targets
include Lil Nas X, Ty Dolla $ign, Adam Devine,
Migos and French Montana.

CHRISSY’S COURT
Chrissy Teigen as a judge? Why not? The model
wears a robe and waves a gavel in a series of
small claim cases — one features two boyfriends
fighting over one of them buying the wrong silly
sweater for someone — that don’t have any of
the testiness of “The People’s Court.” Things are
so relaxed that Teigen’s mother acts as the bailiff.
Teigen is funny and patient and actually a pretty
good judge. And, yes, hubby John Legend does
show up sometimes. “Can I have one thing to
myself ever?” she asks him.

MURDER HOUSE FLIP

Home renovation takes a dark turn in this
series that sees notorious sites of violence
get a makeover. “Murder and makeover don’t
usually go together. But now that’s all going
to change,” says designer Joelle Uzyel in
the first episode. It’s macabre and, at times,
almost seems to mock HGTV’s huge swath
of programming. But the result of the first

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makeover (which takes three episodes) is
breathtaking. The funnest part is watching
the prim and elegant designer Mike Welch
gradually lose his calm. “Dismembered?” he
asks in horror when told what happened years
ago at his new work site.

PRODIGY
Young sports phenoms are the subjects of
this series, hosted with a very light hand by
soccer star Megan Rapinoe. Each documentary-
style episode features interviews and
competition footage of the stars, including of
boxer Chantel Navarro, Olympic gold medal
snowboarder Red Gerard and football player
Korey Foreman. The portraits are deeply
moving and personal, even if they have a
tendency to veer toward adoration. Rapinoe
only appears at the beginning of each episode
to introduce the young athlete. Then she’s
gone, which seems a waste.

THE SHAPE OF PASTA

Foodies should bite on this well-made
travelogue, as chef Evan Funke goes to Italy
to find some of the more unique and
forgotten shapes of pasta. That sounds a little
ridiculous for a premise, but the filmmakers
prove respectful and loving of the topic,
sucking you in. In the first episode, Funke
goes to a tiny Southern town where their
handmade shape is going extinct. “We are
trying to preserve the shape. It’s our identity,”
he is told. The show is beautifully shot but
comes with a warning: If you tune in, you’ll
crave just one thing for dinner.

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THANKS A MILLION
Jennifer Lopez leads this cringe-worthy
show that really only rich people who want
everyone to know they have a heart of gold
would appreciate. Celebs give $100,000 to
someone who touched their lives. Those
people must then give half to someone
else, so the celebrity can create “a chain of
gratitude and kindness.” In Lopez’s case, she
gives the money — inelegantly, stacks of
bills — to a mom with a girl with cerebral
palsy. “You’re so cute!” the girl says to Lopez.
Unfortunately this back-slapping show has
attracted the likes of Kristen Bell, Nick Jonas,
Tracy Morgan, Aaron Rodgers, Kevin Hart and
Karlie Kloss. Even the title is disingenuous.

SKRRT WITH OFFSET

This is another celebrity vanity project
that’ll leave you scratching your head. Offset,
a member of Migos — and husband of
Cardi B — has decided to show off his love
of cars. In the first episode, he puts kids with
cancer in tiny model supercars, like a McLaren
P1 with a top speed of 4 mph. Why, you may
ask, put confused, sick children in model
Ferraris? They don’t even control the cars.
But Offset and Cardi B are happy to take a
victory lap. The second episode is all about
Offset and Lil Yachty attempting Hollywood
driving stunts. In the third, Offset visits Jay
Leno and tours his vast car collection. The
whole series looks a lot of fun for everyone
but Offset.

91
FIERCE QUEENS
One of the odder shows has a ferociously
upbeat Reese Witherspoon narrating nature
documentaries, with a twist. She focuses
on female animals and seems to try to have
them offer lessons of empowerment. The first
episode focuses on sister cheetahs. “It’s tough
being a teenage cheetah,” she says, calling
the two big cat sister “gutsy girls.” Then we
watch the cheetahs stalk and brutally kill an
impala. “Getting that belief in yourself and
gaining confidence, that’s what growing up
is all about,” a chirpy Witherspoon says. “Walk
tall, fierce queens.” The second episode deals
with ant queens and loses its way quickly, with
Witherspoon awkwardly highlighting the violent
queen’s reproductive power. The footage is from
the BBC and it is stunning, even if it shows a limit
to holding the camera vertically.

92
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 MAKING PLANS,
DEFIANTLY, AMID
THE CHAOS AND
MADNESS

As owners of a wedding and event-planning

business, Karina Lopez and Curtis Rogers have
always known how the best-laid plans can
go awry. But there’s no way they could have
imagined just a few weeks ago what would
happen to their very own wedding plans.

First, the joyous bash they’d been meticulously

planning for many months — a three-day
celebration for 200 guests — was thrown into
indefinite limbo. Then they both tested positive
for coronavirus.
Yet now, as they recover in quarantine and
try to keep their distance from each other in a
one-bedroom New York City apartment, Lopez
and Rogers are still making wedding plans —
methodically and, indeed, defiantly. After all,
they’re planners. It’s what keeps them going.

95
“I definitely had one or two meltdowns,” says
Lopez, 32, who is still experiencing symptoms
but feels she’s on the mend. “Which I look
back and realize is so silly, considering what
people are going through.” But now, she
says, wedding planning has become therapy:
“It went from making me insane, to keeping
me sane.”

Making plans. In normal times, it’s a process

we don’t really think about. But during this
pandemic, the process of planning — be it a
short-term grocery list or organizing an entire
summer wedding — has taken on an entirely
different meaning, serving for some as a life
preserver amid all the fear and uncertainty.

It depends on the personality. Some people

thrive by living in the moment. But others really
need their plans.

“For many, having schedules and structure

and timelines and things they can count on
is important. Knowing they can count on
something happening gives them security,
some stability, some purpose,” says Helen
Park, a family therapist, social worker and
specialist in mindfulness.

In current conditions, Park notes, even non-

planner types are seeking ways to organize
their lives. If you’re hunkered down at home,
suddenly Friday doesn’t seem like Friday
because the weekend hardly feels different.
Monday morning carries little of that back-
to-the trenches feeling, even if a Zoom call is
waiting at the kitchen table.
On social media, jokes abound about this
unsettling sense of timelessness.

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97
“What year is it this week?” asks one meme. “It’s
the 87th of March,” goes another. Or: “Today is
Blursday the fortyteenth of Maprilay.”
As Park conducts therapy sessions to help
families eke out a quasi-normal existence, she
finds them unmoored “because it’s not just day-
to-day life that has been upended,” she says.
“The nature of what we’re dealing with is so
new and unknown. Is it two weeks like this, two
months, until the summer, or after? If we knew,
we could start to internally organize our lives.
But the sands are shifting constantly.”

Lopez and Rogers refuse to accept they won’t

be getting married on August 1. A few days
ago, they agreed their wedding would proceed,
whether as the extravaganza they’d planned or,
if necessary, a marriage via Zoom, Lopez says,
“with our immediate families and our officiant in
our living room.”

“As silly as it sounds, this gave me hope,” she says

of the decision. The couple recently wrote a blog
post promising friends their invitations soon —
and untouched.

Kasey Woods cannot give her son his senior

prom via Zoom, much as she’d like to. Woods, a
New York mother of three who works in public
relations, alternates her anxiety about the
pandemic with feelings of pride for her oldest
son, who’s been accepted for the fall to his
mother’s own alma mater, Howard University.
She was hoping that attending admitted
students day would seal the deal for him,
since he’s choosing between several schools.
That, of course, was canceled, along with
prom and a surprise 18th birthday party
she’d been planning.

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And yet Woods keeps planning, too, whatever
she can. “One of my ways of regulating my life
and my mental health is that I have to write
everything down,” she says. “My notebook and
my calendars are my lifeline.”
Michelle Bushee, a real estate broker in
Pittsburgh, has always been an avid planner.
And she’s old-school: Bushee eschews digital
planners for the paper kind — not little black
books, but those big spiral volumes with
expansive pages that she normally fills up
with meetings, house showings, closings and
volunteer activities.

“My weeks used to look really scary,” she says,

meaning scary busy. Now her planner instills
a different kind of fear: The entire month of
April is empty — big white pages of miserable
nothingness. “Now THIS,” she says, “scares me.”

A couple weeks ago, Bushee had what she

admits was “a really bad mental health week, I’ll
be honest. I think it was the shock and the anger
of the situation. I kind of got off track.”

She decided to double down on her morning

routine. For years, this has included rituals like
journaling, writing down three things she’s
grateful for and deciding what will be the “win”
of the day.

“Just something so that at the end of the

day, regardless of how crappy it was, there’s
something that was a win — even taking the
dog for a walk,” she says. Most helpful, though,
is when she’s able to do something for others
— for example, a recent initiative to deliver 500
catered meals to a hospital emergency room for
health care workers.

101
“I find that my purpose is somewhat displaced
right now, and I’m trying to find another
purpose,” she says. “So part of my planning has
become, ‘Who can I help today?’”
A big music fan, she’s also holding onto the list
of concerts she bought tickets for this spring and
summer: the Rolling Stones, the Doobie Brothers,
Dave Matthews. Some have been canceled;
others surely will be. But she keeps the list.
Park, the family therapist, appreciates that
people need their plans. She worries, though,
that trying to hold onto a rigid structure that
no longer makes sense may produce anxiety in
102
itself. “You can be putting in a lot of energy to
fight to keep that structure in place,” she says.
If a day is particularly bad — and Bushee says
she’s had plenty — she finds she can at least
draw comfort from a very simple bit of prescribed
structure that’s really a built-in piece of planning in
miniature: a recipe. Cooking at home has become
not only a necessity, but a release.
“I made chicken pot pie for my family the
other day,” she says. “including homemade
crust, which I never do. You know what? It
was pretty awesome.”
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Image: Allef Vinicius
105
Though millions of professionals are relying on
technology to adapt to working from home,
others do not have that luxury, with their jobs
on the line due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
With no end in sight, making the best of your
circumstances and utilizing your talents during
quarantine could help you to unlock a revenue
stream and turn a side hustle into a career.

CHANGING EVERY PART OF OUR LIVES

As the coronavirus spreads to all four corners
of the globe, businesses and individuals are
beginning to feel the pinch. The airline industry
has, quite literally, fallen from the sky, bars
and restaurants have been forced to close in
many countries, and actors, barbers, beauty
therapists, and personal trainers are just some of
the entrepreneurs who are suffering the most.
Entering these new uncertain times isn’t easy for
anyone, but if your income derives from meeting
other people or working in the city, you’d be
putting yourself at unnecessary risk to leave the
house and continue your operations - and the
chances are, you’d have no customers anyway.
With an increasing number of citizens finding
themselves at home with no work, a record
10 million have applied for unemployment
benefits in the United States, and it is a
similar picture in other markets like the United
Kingdom, where governments are stepping in
to allow businesses to furlough employees to
reduce the number of potential job losses.
Perhaps the most difficult part of the COVID-19
crisis, aside from the obvious humanitarian
challenges that await, is the huge uncertainty.
But rather than waiting for the storm to pass
and for the world to return to a more normal

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Image: Gianandrea Villa
107
 Image: Jenelle Hayes

108
state of affairs, it is possible to adjust to your
new surroundings and make the best of a bad
situation. We all have talents and skills that can
be utilized by others, and with so many citizens
now at home with endless time on their hands,
there are ample opportunities to get your
entrepreneurial hat on and make some money.
With the right tools and resources, you could
forge a career that could last a lifetime.

ADAPTING IN THESE TRYING TIMES

Aside from pharmaceutical giants and grocery
stores, it’s hard to think of an industry that
the coronavirus pandemic hasn’t touched.
From florists to catering companies and from
fashion outlets to solicitors, businesses are
seeing demand for their products and services
plummet, including Bandsintown LLC, which
before the spread of the virus had more than
430,000 future events on its books. Since
then, most of them have been postponed or
canceled, with stars like Justin Bieber putting
the brakes on world tours, despite millions
in ticket sales. But rather than admit defeat
and wait for the crisis to die down, the brand
has partnered with Amazon’s Twitch to offer
fans the chance to watch live performances
from their favorite artists, paying a small fee for
a virtual ticket. Presently, artists who want to
generate an income from the site must submit
an application, but Bandsintown has helped to
fast-track the process to help some bands and
musicians collect revenue virtually overnight.

The company calls the venture as a “reshuffling”

of its product roadmap, allowing artists to hold
virtual concerts from their living rooms, and earn
cash for doing so. Other celebrities are taking

109
to sites like MasterClass, an online education
platform where students can access tutorials
and lectures pre-recorded by experts in various
niches. MasterClass features stars such as
Kelly Wearstler who teaches interior design
lessons, Gordon Ramsay who teaches cookery
courses, and RuPaul, who shares advice on self-
expression and authenticity, but rival platforms
are offering similar opportunities for personal
trainers, musicians, and more.

In light of school closures and shortages of

teachers and key staff in the US, educational
facilities are taking lectures online with
presentations and home-learning exercises
so classes can run as normal, and so students
can complete their diplomas and degrees
without too much disruption. And there’s
a whole wave of organizations popping up
offering one-on-one tutoring for students
around the world, hosted by furloughed
teachers, selling personalized classes for
kindergarten students through university-level
professionals. The key is innovation, and being
able to adapt to these changing circumstances
at breakneck speed. In China, for example,
food delivery disruptors (those similar such as
UberEats) have adapted by offering grocery
deliveries for those in isolation or suffering
from the coronavirus, subsequently adding
billions of yen to their market valuation.

UTILIZING SKILLS AND ASSETS

Whether you want to sell your writing,
illustrations, artwork, marketing skills,
photography, programming, design, books,
handicrafts, recipes, coaching, music, clothes,
plants, or time, there are so many opportunities

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Image: Motortion
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112
to reinvent yourself and become an authority
during these challenging circumstances,
offering your talents to the world for a fee.
Whether you share your artwork on Reddit
and take commissions in your direct messages,
post your interior design skills on Pinterest
and offer virtual appointments via Zoom, or
develop an app for the App Store that bundles
together your knowledge with video tutorials
and exercises, there are endless possibilities,
provided you are motivated and are ready to put
in some hard graft.

Quarantine also offers an opportunity for

experienced professionals and entrepreneurs
to put pen to paper and begin their own book.
eBooks and paperbacks on career development
and self-help go down well, and though they
might take several months to write and format
ready for sale, the payoff can be enormous with
the right push. One author earns $450,000
a year from self-published books on Amazon.
You could even create an eBook and offer it
as a free download in exchange for email
addresses, perfect for lead generation.

CHOOSING THE RIGHT PLATFORMS

Once you’ve decided on a skill you’d like to sell,
the next step is to find the right platform so you
can find customers. Naturally, social media is a
good place to start, though setting up a new
account for your entrepreneurial efforts makes
sense, as it may be offputting to some if you
try to sell products directly to your friends and
family during these unprecedented times.

Freelancing with a specific skill set you have is

a great way to make money from home, and

113
becoming part of the “gig economy”. Websites
like Fiverr, UpWork and PeoplePerHour are
good starting points, connecting you to people
looking for your services, as are freelancer
and virtual assistant Facebook groups, with
entrepreneurs requesting help with translation,
copywriting, presenting, graphic design, and
more. Know your skills, decide on your hourly
rate, and put yourself out there. The more
platforms you appear on, the more likely you
are to find clients and earn an income from
your home.
It is, however, very important that you
understand the downsides of such gig websites.
Fiverr is “the worst place to start a freelancing
career” according to Roshan Perera from
Freelancer Hacks, as the platform puts quantity
over quality, attracts scammers, and charges
ludicrous fees. For example, if you sell a coaching
session for $100, Fiverr will charge you $20, and
the seller will pay $105 - that’s $25 in additional
revenue you could be taking home if you were
to work with a client directly.

If you don’t have any particularly useful skills,

one easy way to make money from your home
is to sign up for online survey websites like
Swagbucks and share your opinion on brands,
research topics, and politics. Most surveys
take anywhere from five minutes to an hour,
and you’ll get paid a few dollars for your time.
However, there are sometimes surveys that can
pay $50, $100, or more, though these typically
require more involvement such as testing a
physical product or allowing eye-tracking
software on your devices. Make sure you read
into the terms and conditions of each service
before you get started, as some companies pay

114
Image: Kelly Sikkema

115
just pennies for your time or have unachievable
thresholds. Another survey site to consider is
Google Opinion Rewards, which offers Play
Store credit.

Other ways to make money during the

COVID-19 crisis is to clear out your closet and
sell your unwanted goods on sites like eBay
and Gazelle, teaching online using a platform
like Chegg or TutorMe, with most teachers
netting between $15 and $50 an hour, or even
stepping outside of your home (following local
government guidelines) and joining an app
like DoorDash, delivering food, medicines, and

116
Image: Erik Mclean

117
groceries to those in need who cannot leave the
house due to isolation.

In these truly remarkable times, being able to

think outside of the box for ways to generate
an income is critical, particularly if your job is
on the line or you have been made redundant.
Dare yourself to unleash your inner creativity,
develop a skill you’ve always wanted to try using
eLearning sites, explore your hidden talents, and
give yourself and your abilities to the world. It
may be scary, and it might not work, but it could
take you on a whole new career path and give
you purpose and confidence at a time when it
matters the most. Good luck!

118
Image: Max Delsid
119
MICROSOFT
ENGINEER ADAPTS
FAN-TRACKING APP
FOR COVID-19 USE

120
A Microsoft engineer who designed an app to
track North Dakota State University football fans
on their annual trek to Texas for the national
championship has taken that concept and
applied it to contact tracing for the coronavirus.
The Care19 app is meant to help reduce the
spread of COVID-19 by retracing the steps of
people who test positive for the virus, in order
to find others who may have had contact with
the sick person and also collect data to help
with modeling, Gov. Doug Burgum said Tuesday
during his daily briefing.
“This is a way that every North Dakotan can
save lives by downloading the Care19 app,”
Burgum said.
Tim Brookins, 55, a principal software engineer
at Fargo’s Microsoft campus and CEO of sports
app software company ProudCrowd, came up
with the popular Bison Tracker app a half-dozen
years ago. Last year, more than 15,000 football
fans from various states and provinces accessed
the app en route to North Dakota State’s eighth
national title in nine years.

121
122
Burgum, a former executive at Microsoft,
sparked the idea at a COVID-19 brainstorming
session with Microsoft engineers when
he introduced Brookins as the creator of
Bison Tracker.
“My staff just lit up and said, ‘That’s what we
need,’” Brookins told The Associated Press.
The app is free and optional. It has been
approved for Apple users and should be
available for Android devices in about a week,
Burgum said.
Like the Bison Tracker, Care19 is anonymous and
doesn’t ask for names, phone numbers or log-
in information. Once the app is downloaded,
individuals will be given a random ID number
and it will cache the individual’s locations
throughout the day. Users are then encouraged
to categorize their movement into different
groups such as work or grocery.
State health officials have so far been relying
on extensive interviews with people who are
sick, or in some cases incapacitated. The app
should show all the places the user has been
for at least 15 minutes, the time it takes to put
people at high risk for contracting the virus if
there’s face-to-face contact, according to federal
health officials.
The app can also assign a risk score to the users
depending how they move and interact across
the state, Brookins said. If a person stays home
for the most part with maybe an occasional trip
to the grocery store or gas station, he or she
would be assigned to a low-risk pool. If people
to work for eight hours, in many cases for jobs
deemed essential, that would likely place them
in the high-risk bucket.

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124
The information should be valuable for state
officials in their modeling and planning, said
Brookins, noting that Burgum is a “very data-
driven man.” One reason the governor has not
issued a stay-at-home order is because he said
he hasn’t found statistics showing that it makes
a difference.
“Everybody wants to know, especially our
president, when we can go back to normal,
when we can release the stay-at-homes, things
like that,” Brookins said. “Well, knowing how
people are moving will inform that and we’ll
have much better projections.”

125
126
 MODELING
CORONAVIRUS:
‘UNCERTAINTY
IS THE ONLY
CERTAINTY’

A statistical model cited by the White House

generated a slightly less grim figure this week
for a first wave of deaths from the coronavirus
pandemic in the U.S. — a projection designed to
help officials plan for the worst, including having
enough hospital staff, beds and ventilators.

The only problem with this bit of relatively good

news? It’s almost certainly wrong. All models
are wrong. Some are just less wrong than others
— and those are the ones that public health
officials rely on.

127
Welcome to the grimace-and-bear-it world
of modeling.

“The key thing is that you want to know

what’s happening in the future,” said NASA top
climate modeler Gavin Schmidt. “Absent a time
machine you’re going to have to use a model.”

Weather forecasters use models. Climate

scientists use them. Supermarkets use them.

As leaders try to get a handle on the

coronavirus outbreak, they are turning
to numerous mathematical models to help
them figure out what might — key word,
might — happen next and what they should
try to do now to contain and prepare for
the spread.

The model updated this week by the University

of Washington — the one most often
mentioned by U.S. health officials at White
House briefings — predicts daily deaths in the
U.S. will hit a peak in mid-April then decline
through the summer.

Their latest projection shows that anywhere

from 49,431 to 136,401 Americans will die in
the first wave, which will last into the summer.
That’s a huge range of 87,000. But only a few
days earlier the same team had a range of
nearly 138,000, with 177,866 as the top number
of deaths. Officials credit social distancing.
The latest calculations are based on better
data on how the virus acts, more information
on how people act and more cities as
examples. For example, new data from Italy
and Spain suggest social distancing is working
even better than expected to stop the spread
of the virus.

128
Image: Nasa
129
130
The time it took for the epidemic to peak — that
is, for those deaths to start declining — was
shorter in those Italian and Spanish cities than it
was Wuhan, China, said Dr. Christopher Murray
of the University of Washington, who developed
the model.

So how does modeling work? Take everything

we know about how the coronavirus is
spreading, when it’s deadly and when it’s not,
when symptoms show and when they don’t.

Then factor in everything we know about how

people are reacting, social distancing, stay-at-
home orders and other squishy human factors.

Now add everything we know about testing,

treating the disease and equipment shortages.
Finally, mix in large dollops of uncertainty at
every level.

Squeeze all those thousands of data points into

incredibly complex mathematical equations
and voila, here’s what’s going to happen next
with the pandemic. Except, remember, there’s a
huge margin of error: For the prediction of U.S.
deaths, the range is larger than the population
of Wilmington, Delaware.
“No model is perfect, but most models are
somewhat useful,” said John Allen Paulos, a
professor of math at Temple University and
author of several books about math and
everyday life. “But we can’t confuse the model
with reality.”
One challenge for modelers is dealing with
seesawing death totals from overburdened
public health departments. A state’s data might
show big swings in deaths — but only because
a backlog of reports showed up all at once.

131
132
The tremendous leaps in deaths in a single day
could throw off predictions.
Another problem, said University of Texas
disease modeler Lauren Meyer, is that most of
the pandemic models, including hers, are based
on how influenza acts, and that is different from
this new coronavirus.
Most models use calculus to factor in “things
you can’t predict,” Meyer said. To her, they are
simple equations, ones that a person who knows
advanced calculus can figure out. To the rest of
the world, it’s Greek. Literally full of sigmas, phis,
omegas and other symbols.
Even with all of the uncertainty, “it’s much better
than shooting from the hip,” said Meyer, who
is churning out iterations of what she calls a
“workhorse model” of COVID-19 for the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention. “Data-driven
models are the best evidence we have.”

Because of the large fudge factor, it’s smart

not to look at one single number — the
minimum number of deaths, or the maximum
for that matter — but instead at the range of
confidence, where there’s a 95% chance reality
will fall, mathematician Paulos said. For the
University of Washington model, that’s from
50,000 to 136,000 deaths.
Uncertainty will shrink with time, but never
really go away — just like in hurricane
forecasts, when the cone of uncertainty shrinks
as the storm gets closer to making landfall, but
remains large.
“Uncertainty is the only certainty there is,” Paulos
said. “And knowing how to live with insecurity is
the only security.”

133
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 CDC CONSIDERS
LOOSENING
GUIDELINES FOR
SOME EXPOSED
TO VIRUS

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

is considering changing its guidelines for self-
isolation to make it easier for those who have
been exposed to someone with the coronavirus
to return to work if they are without symptoms.

The public health agency, in conjunction

with the White House coronavirus task force,
is considering an announcement as soon as
Wednesday, Vice President Mike Pence said.

Under the proposed guidance, people who are

exposed to someone infected would be allowed
back on the job if they have no symptoms, test
their temperature twice a day and wear a face
mask, said a person familiar with the proposal
under consideration. The person was not
authorized to publicly discuss the draft because
it had not been finalized and described the
proposal on the condition of anonymity.

135
The new policy is aimed in particular at
workers in critical jobs. But it also comes as the
Trump administration is eyeing what it calls
a “stabilization” in infection rates and looks
toward rolling back some of the restrictive
social distancing guidelines and restarting the
stalled economy.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious
diseases expert, said that even as death rates
rise, the administration has been working on
plans to eventually reopen the country amid
“glimmers of hope” that social distancing is
working to stop the virus’ spread.

“If, in fact, we are successful, it makes sense to at

least plan what a reentry into normality would
look like,” he said on Fox News Channel.

“That doesn’t mean we’re going to do it right

now,” he added. “But it means we need to be
prepared to ease into that. And there’s a lot of
activity going on.”

136
137
Dr. Deborah Birx, a leader on the White House’s
coronavirus task force, called the upcoming CDC
guidance “a very important piece.”
“It looks at degree of exposure and really making
it clear that exposure occurs within 6 feet for
more than 15 minutes, so really understanding
where you shouldn’t be within 6 feet of people
right now,” Birx told CBS.

The proposed guidance would follow

recommendations made by the CDC that eased
self-isolation requirements for front-line medical
workers who were exposed to the virus. Under
CDC guidance, medical workers who have
been exposed to the virus without protective
equipment but who have no symptoms can
return to work with a mask and temperature
checks after 14 days.

Pence said the White House is focusing on the

“point of need” for the current situation but also
is operating on another track to consider future
recommendations for the public.

For most people, the new coronavirus causes

mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and
cough that clear up in two to three weeks. For
some, especially older adults and people with
existing health problems, it can cause more
severe illness, including pneumonia, and death.
In the United States, there have been about
400,000 cases and about 13,000 deaths.
In fashioning the recommendations, the
administration appeared to be trying to balance
political concerns about wanting to preserve as
much normalcy as possible with public health
concerns that some infections are being spread
by people who seem to be healthy.

138
139
 Image: Claudio Furlan
140
 UI HOSPITAL
USING VIRTUAL
TECHNOLOGY
TO TREAT VIRUS
PATIENTS

University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics reported

that it has successfully treated dozens of
COVID-19 patients through a program that allows
them to stay in their homes while they recover.
Doctors use virtual technology to check daily
on patients who have been diagnosed with
the disease, freeing up the hospital for the
small percentage of those who need more
intensive care.
So far, 35 patients in the program have
recovered while only three have needed to be
admitted to the hospital, said UIHC chief medical
officer Theresa Brennan. Another 38 are still
being monitored through the program.
Brennan said she was going public with the
program’s success in the hope that other
hospitals follow suit, potentially preventing
them from being overwhelmed with patients.
One key lesson, she said, was that doctors often
need to encourage patients to stay hydrated
because they get a bad taste in their mouth and
don’t want to eat and drink.

141
142
 LOCAL
NEWSPAPERS
ARE FACING
THEIR OWN
CORONAVIRUS
CRISIS

Just when Americans need it most, a U.S.

newspaper industry already under stress is
facing an unprecedented new challenge.
Readers desperate for information are more
reliant than ever on local media as the
coronavirus spreads across the U.S. They want
to know about cases in their area, where testing
centers are, what the economic impact is. Papers
say online traffic and subscriptions have risen
-- the latter even when they’ve lowered paywalls
for pandemic-related stories.

But newspapers and other publications are

under pressure as advertising craters. They
are cutting jobs, staff hours and pay, dropping
print editions -- and in some cases shutting
down entirely.

Circulation and web traffic are up at the Sun

Chronicle, a daily in Attleboro, Massachusetts, as

143
144
it scrambles to cover the coronavirus pandemic.
It’s “all we do,” said Craig Borges, executive editor
and general manager. But with many local
restaurants, gyms, colleges and other businesses
closed, the paper has laid off a handful of
sales and mailroom employees and a political
reporter. It has about a dozen newsroom
employees left.
“Hopefully we can work this out and make it
through,” Borges said.

Researchers have long worried that the next

recession — which economists say is already
upon us — “could be an extinction-level event
for newspapers,” said Penelope Abernathy, a
University of North Carolina professor who
studies the news industry.

More than 2,100 cities and towns have lost a

paper in the past 15 years, mostly weeklies, and
newsroom employment has shrunk by half since
2004. Many publications struggled as consumers
turned to the internet for news, battered by the
Great Recession of 2007-2009 and the rise of
giants like Google and Facebook that dominated
the market for digital ads.

More recently, big national newspapers like The

New York Times, The Washington Post and The
Wall Street Journal have diversified revenue
by adding millions of digital subscribers. Many
others, however, remain heavily dependent
on advertising.
Twenty global news publishers recently
surveyed by the International News Media
Association expect a median 23% decline
in 2020 ad sales. In the U.S., newspaper ad
revenues have dropped 20% to 30% in the
last few weeks compared with a year ago, FTI

145
Consulting’s Ken Harding wrote in another
INMA report.
Last week, the largest U.S. newspaper chain,
Gannett, announced 15-day furloughs and
pay cuts for many employees. Another major
chain, Lee Enterprises, also announced salary
reductions and furloughs. The Tampa Bay Times,
owned by the nonprofit Poynter Institute, cut
five days of its print edition and announced
furloughs for non-newsroom staff.

Further down the food chain, many smaller

publishers -- particularly local alt-weeklies with
a heavy focus on dining, arts and entertainment
-- are making even harder decisions.

In rural Nevada, Battle Born Media is scaling

back or ceasing publication of six rural weekly
newspapers. The Reno News & Review, an
alternative weekly, suspended operations and
laid off all staffers. C&G Newspapers, which
publishes 19 weekly newspapers near Detroit,
suspended print publication. Alternative paper
Pittsburgh Current went online-only.

Report for America, which subsidizes journalists

in local newsrooms and at The Associated Press,
says some of its local-media partners report such
deteriorating finances that they may not be able
to pay their half of these reporters’ salaries.

In suburban St. Louis last week, businesses were

calling and cancelling ads as fast as editor Don
Corrigan and his staff could write articles to fill
the empty space left behind. A local hospital
wanted to run a full-page ad offering tips to
fight the virus in the three community weeklies
he runs — but wanted it for free. A softhearted
Corrigan agreed.

146
147
He announced this week that the Webster-
Kirkwood Times, South County Time and West
End World will stop publishing, although he’s
keeping the website running. “I don’t think
people realize how much it costs to put out a
newspaper,” he said, noting that some readers
are belatedly suggesting a GoFundMe page or a
paywall for the web site.

A $2.2 trillion relief act signed by President

Donald Trump could provide loans or grants
to smaller local publishers who maintain
their payrolls. Industry executives are also
discussing future government bailout requests
that would preserve the independence of
news organizations, two newspaper-industry
trade groups wrote in a letter to Trump and
congressional leaders.

One proposal under discussion would

recommend creating a federal fund to pay for
government newspaper ads that offer health
advice. Another possibility might be to offer
people tax credits for subscriptions.

The Shepherd Express newspaper, which

took its name from an Allen Ginsberg poem,
has for 38 years told residents of Milwaukee,
Wisconsin, about up-and-coming musicians,
hot restaurants, crooked politicians and where
to find hemp-related products. Last week, it
suspended publication and laid off staff.

Editor, publisher and owner Louis Fortis is

keeping the website operating and promises to
resume printing at some point, in some form. Yet
he’s feeling the same uncertainty as millions of
other Americans. “I’m very disappointed,” he said.
“On the other hand, you have to look at the big
picture. People are dying.”

148
149
 MARVEL REMAKES
RELEASE CALENDAR;
‘MULAN’ MOVES TO
LATE JULY

150
The Walt Disney Co. overhauled its release
schedule by moving the dates of half a dozen
Marvel movies, announcing a new one for the
live-action adaption of “Mulan” and pushing one
movie, “Artemis Fowl,” to Disney Plus, in response
to the coronavirus pandemic.
“Black Widow,” the Marvel entry starring
Scarlett Johansson, had been set to kick off the
summer movie season. Instead, Disney said it
will now open Nov. 6. Such delays have unique
ramifications for Marvel movies because of
their interconnection. With “Black Widow” on
the move, that meant a domino effect, pushing
most all upcoming Marvel releases back at least
three months.
“Black Widow” took the release date of “The
Eternals,” which now moves to February 21
next year. “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the

151
152
Ten Rings” departs that February date for May
7, 2021. “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of
Madness” shifts from next May to Nov. 5, 2021.
And “Thor: Love and Thunder” is pushed three
months, to Feb. 18, 2022.
Disney isn’t abandoning the summer
completely. “Mulan,” which been scheduled for
March and already had its red carpet premiere,
will now open July 24. The company also didn’t
move the Pixar release “Soul” from its June 19
release date. Those plans, of course, are subject
to movie theaters being reopened by then and
the pandemic subsiding.
While Disney shifted nearly all of its big-budget
movies, it’s going to send one to its streaming
service. The Kenneth Branagh-directed science
fiction adventure adaptation “Artemis Fowl” will
go to Disney Plus instead of opening in theaters.
The movie had originally been slate for release
last August but had been rescheduled for May of
this year. With the exception of Universal’s “Trolls
World Tour,” the major studios have chosen to
delay their top releases rather than push them to
digital release and sacrifice box-office revenue.
“Jungle Cruise,” with Dwayne Johnson and Emily
Blunt, is being pushed back a full year to July 30,
2021. The release of the fifth “Indiana Jones” movie,
which Steven Spielberg last month departed as
director with James Mangold replacing him, is also
being delayed a full year, to July 2022. Harrison
Ford will be 80 years old by then.
Wes Anderson’s “The French Dispatch” is also
postponed from July to Oct. 16.
The Walt Disney Co. announced they will start
furloughing some workers in two weeks at its
theme parks resorts in Florida and California.

153
154
 SXSW PARTNERS
WITH AMAZON
TO PUT ITS FILM
FESTIVAL ONLINE

The popcorn will be bring your own and the

barbecue won’t be as good, but the Austin,
Texas, SXSW Film Festival is moving online
after having its 27th edition canceled by the
coronavirus pandemic.

SXSW announced that it’s partnering with

Amazon Prime Video to stream as much of its
movie line-up as possible for a 10-day period in
the U.S. It will be free to viewers with or without
an Amazon Prime membership.

155
South by Southwest organizers have worked
frantically to salvage what they could of the
festival and bring attention to the many films
that had been planning to premiere there.
SXSW, which had been scheduled to run
March 13-22, last week announced awards for
its competition categories, anyway.
Individual films will choose whether they
want to opt in to the 10-day “SXSW 2020 Film
Festival Collection” on Amazon. Don’t count
on movies acquired by Netflix, for example, to
participate. The festival declined to say how
many films it expects to host.

But for the filmmakers that do join in, the

digital platform could offer a measure of solace
for their missed SXSW premiere, and all the
promotion benefit that a major festival entails.
Filmmakers who participate will receive a
screening fee.

“Ever since SXSW was canceled by the City of

Austin, we’ve been focused on how we could
help the incredible films and filmmakers in
the SXSW 2020 Film Festival lineup,” said Janet
Pierson, director of film at SXSW. “We’re inspired
by the adaptability and resilience of the film
community as it searches for creative solutions
in this unprecedented crisis.”

SXSW and Prime Video are aiming to hold the

10-day online event in late April.

Jennifer Salke, head of Amazon Studios, said

she hopes the online SXSW “can help give back
some of that experience, and showcase artists
and films that audiences might otherwise not
have had the chance to see.”

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 CELEBRITIES
REVEAL NEW
SIDES DURING
VIRUS, BUT FACE
BACKLASH

Portia de Rossi has been teaching herself how to

cook during the coronavirus lockdown. It’s been
an eye-opening experience for the actress —
and for her fans.
She’s cut herself and been burned, yes. She’s
also discovered she doesn’t like some Indian
flavors and that her longtime wife, talk show
host Ellen Degeneres, isn’t a fan of curry and
garbanzo beans.
“We’re learning a lot about each other in
quarantine!” she admits on Instagram.
We are indeed learning a lot about each other
these days, and that’s especially true with our
celebrities. Social distancing has meant they
have no army of publicists or glam squad.
They’re bored and unfiltered — and often
incredibly relatable.

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Cardi B recently inexplicably ran headfirst into a
massive Jenga tower and a daffy Madonna sang
her hit “Vogue” into a hairbrush but changed the
lyrics to include fried fish. Hillary Swank learned
to crochet — and now has a new knit hat to
prove it. Ariana Grande showed off her natural
hair and Marlee Matlin put on her old wedding
dress. “I’m losing my mind but what else is there
to do?” she wrote.
Stuck inside, Justin Bieber reverted to a
childhood objective. Clad in a onesie and a
winter hat, the singer attempted a round of “
The Floor Is Lava ” in his massive living room,
leaping onto cushions, chairs, foot stools, two
skateboard and a roller. The video has been seen
over 9 million times.
“I think now people need the human touch even
more, and I think celebrities really understand
that,” says Neal Schaffer, a social media strategy
consultant whose new book is “ The Age of
Influence.”“People want to relate to real things,
real people.”
While some influencers and stars continue
to post a flood of flattering, carefully stage-
managed images with every hair in place, others
are indeed mirroring us — unshaven, unwashed
and not ashamed.
“When I drink, I get really, really brilliant ideas,”
the singer Pink confessed recently. “And last
night, I got an idea — I can cut hair.” She then
reveals some choppy, shaved spots on her head.
Celebrities, it turns out, really are just like us:
They get drunk and do stupid stuff, too. And
they’re like us in another way, too: Pink later
announced that she also had contracted
the virus.

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The coronavirus has also unlocked places we
never expected to go, like Selena Gomez’s
bathroom and inside Broadway star Adrienne
Warren’s bathtub. We’ve gotten to inspect Rosie
O’Donnell’s messy garage/art studio.
Theater icon Patti LuPone was taking part in a
livestreamed benefit led by O’Donnell when
theater fans grew enchanted by something
they’d never seen before: Lupone’s cool
basement. They could see a colorful, light-up
vintage jukebox and a wall rack stacked with
cassette tapes.
So LuPone leaned into the interest, later making
little video tours on Twitter that include her
subterranean one-armed bandit, a massage
table, mementos, her desk and a pinball
machine. “I have so much to show you,” she says.
Yuval Ben-Itzhak, the CEO of Socialbakers, a
social media marketing company, has noticed
the trend and encourages it. He suspects fans
will reward the more honest of celebrities at the
other end of this crisis.
“By giving their audience a glimpse into their
lives — from showing their homes, their families
or themselves looking casual, like people
typically do at home — celebrities are likely to
actually increase their engagement,” Ben-Itzhak
says. “Users seem to really engage with natural,
authentic-looking content, especially right now.
It gives a feeling of ‘We’re all in this together.’”
We may be all in this together, but we’re not
equal. After all, celebs may be just like us, except
they’re usually much richer. The new intimate
view we have of the famous reveals a chasm:
Bieber’s living room is large enough to fit several
regular living rooms. Not everyone can self-
isolate on a yacht.

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A few weeks into the virus’ onslaught in
America, some commentators had soured on
the shenanigans of celebrities. “I don’t care what
celebs are doing in their mansions,” one wrote
on Instagram. Another posted a warning: “Funny
how irrelevant they become when real problems
curse us.”
The first real sign that celebrity exposure was
curdling was when “Wonder Woman” star
Gal Gadot led a sing-along of “Imagine” with
such stars as James Marsden, Zoe Kravitz,
Amy Adams and Mark Ruffalo. Pushback came
quickly, with some commentators calling it
“cringeworthy” and “out of touch.” They asked
for donations, not songs.
Akshaya Sreenivasan, a social media marketing
expert at Texas A&M University’s Mays Business
School, says as the COVID-19 crisis drags on,
celebrities are bound to face more online hate.
“Even Oprah is not going to be immune,” she
says. “The big guys in Hollywood are going to be
shredded to pieces, especially if they continue to
post on Instagram, ‘Oh my God, I’m so bored. I’m
drinking martinis in my private pool.’”
Sreenivasan anticipates some celebs will lose
followers if they continue posting without
sensitivity to the losses outside their mansions.
And she thinks many will open their wallets to
compensate for all the years of Instagram glam.
“They need to do something to protect that
brand,” she says.

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There’s also danger if celebrities unartfully
choose to profit off the virus. Social media
experts warn that this may not be the time to be
pushing products for gain.
Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson walks toward that
line when he relentlessly floods his Instagram
account to highlight and hype the brand of
tequila he owns.
“You really need to be sensitive to your
audience, and you need to be very careful if
you want to walk that line,” says Schaffer. “It is a
dangerous subject. A celebrity is only as good
as their community. It can work against them as
quickly as it works for them.”
Despite this new and unvarnished look at celebs
and the pushback it has triggered, Sreenivasan
is skeptical that anything will really change once
normal life resumes.
“We’ve had this conversation forever,” she
says. “We’re going to move on until the next
problem comes, and we’ll have this inequality
conversation again.”

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 ALASKA
RESIDENTS URGED
TO COMPLETE
CENSUS ONLINE,
BY PHONE

An Alaska official trying to promote participation

in the national census has urged residents to file
their forms online and by phone as the state falls
behind the national response average.
The push for remote filing comes as efforts by
the U.S. Census Bureau to collect residency data
have been been hampered by the cornoavirus
pandemic, Alaska Public Media reported.
The outbreak prompted the agency to close
field offices and delay door-to-door interviews.
The national response rate stands at nearly 43%,
but less than 27% of Alaska households have
completed the form.

169
Many Alaska residents who have been
waiting for visits from census takers are
unaware they can file without the visits,
Cook Inlet Housing Authority Chief Operating
Officer Gabe Layman said.
“People in remote Alaska were not notified
that they could respond online, because it
was anticipated that a census-taker would be
going to every single household,” said Layman,
who is part of the nonprofit census education
campaign Alaska Counts.

Census packets mailed to homes include

personal codes for the online forms, but the
codes are not necessary for filing, Layman said.

“You can simply go to the site, indicate that

you want to fill out your census form online,
and there’s a little prompt to enter the code,”
he said. “But there is a box that you can
check that just says ‘I don’t have my code’ and
it’s not a problem.”

Phone calls to report census data takes

minutes and there are no penalties for
households that accidentally report more
than once, Layman said.
“There are a lot of folks on the front lines helping
battle the spread of COVID-19. One thing that
we can all do from the comfort of our homes
is to hop online or to pick up a phone and
complete our census,” Layman said.

For most people, the coronavirus causes mild or

moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough
that clear up in two to three weeks. For some,
especially older adults and people with existing
health problems, it can cause more severe
illness, including pneumonia and death.

170
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 DANCING ALONE:
A SENIOR CENTER
KEEPS CLIENTS
UP AND MOVING

Dance instructor Lola Jaramillo switches the

radio to an uplifting salsa song.

“My students love this one,” says Jaramillo,

dancing to the rhythm of “Life is a Carnival” and
encouraging her class to follow her steps.

But her students -- mostly older Hispanics -- are

not around. Instead, a video camera records her
in an empty room.

Her elderly students are huddled in their homes,

following orders to protect themselves from
the new coronavirus, which hits older people
especially hard. And in their homes, they can
dance along with Jaramillo, getting the exercise
that is so important to maintaining their health
and mobility.
The dance lesson was shared on the social
media accounts of a nonprofit senior center in
Washington that has been serving the capital’s
older Hispanic community for over 50 years.

173
Since mid-March, Vida Senior Center has
recorded the exercise classes, most of which are
taught in Spanish. The effort aims to keep older
adults engaged during the pandemic with a
touch of Latin flair.
“There is no physical connection now, but there
is an emotional connection and we’re trying to
do this in different ways,” says Blanche Cotlear,
the center’s executive director.
Besides exercise videos, the group has also
recorded their nutrition tips and relaxation classes
and shared information about COVID-19 in Spanish.

The center also usually provides services such

as free meals and health screenings, and has
adapted to provide those things during the crisis
as well: It is offering medication monitoring
and counseling sessions over the phone, and
coordinating the delivery of meals to almost 200
of the more vulnerable clients.

Cotlear says feeding the social media accounts

with video classes was a creative way to keep
her clients company in times of social distancing,
when many might feel isolated and scared.

“We are the second home for many, many

Hispanic seniors,” especially those who are low-
income who have no family nearby or whose
relatives live abroad, she said.
Jovina Guillén de León, a 67-year-old from
the Dominican Republic who attends Vida
Senior Center, recently followed one of the
online exercise classes in her kitchen while her
roommate filmed her moving around.
“We have to thank God for the years we’ve lived,”
says De León. “And also do our part by telling
family members that in life, everything passes.”

174
 Dancing seniors stay active during virus outbreak

Image: Federica Narancio

175
CATCH THIS WEEK’S
SUPERMOON, BIGGEST
AND BRIGHTEST
OF YEAR

176
 A supermoon rises in the sky this week, looking
to be the biggest and brightest of the year.
Not only will the moon be closer to Earth than
usual, it will also be a full moon. Scientists call
this cosmic combo a supermoon. The moon was
221,855 miles (357,042 kilometers) away at its
fullest Tuesday night, making it appear larger
and more brilliant.
NASA is encouraging everyone to look skyward,
whether it’s outside or through a living
room window.
Scientist Noah Petro of NASA’s Goddard Space
Flight Center in Maryland said the important
thing is to stay safe while moon-gazing during
the pandemic.
“If you can’t get out safely ... then fine,” Petro said.
“Go out next month or whenever it’s safe again.
Use the full moon as an excuse to get out and
start looking at the moon.”
He added: “Use this as an opportunity to not
physically distance yourself, but emotionally
connect with something that is physically far
from us.”

Image: Ben Lawry

177
Full Coverage: Science
There’s a string of supermoons this spring. So if
you miss the upcoming lunar show, catch the
next one May 7.
In mid-April, the waning moon will pass by
Saturn, Jupiter and Mars, clustered in the
southeastern sky before dawn.
All this comes after a brilliant Venus passed a few
days ago in front of the Pleiades, the so-called
Seven Sisters star cluster.
“We’ve really been fortunate to have some good
astronomy — backyard astronomy or living
room astronomy,” Petro said.

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 AFTER VIRUS,
HOW WILL
AMERICANS’ VIEW
OF THE WORLD
CHANGE?

As the coronavirus spread across the world

and began its reach into the United States, an
assortment of Americans from the president on
down summoned one notion as they framed the
emerging cataclysm.

“The Chinese virus,” they called it — or, in a few

particularly racist cases, the “kung flu.” No matter
the terminology of choice, the message was
clear: Whatever the ravages of COVID-19 are
causing, it’s somewhere else’s fault.
Not someone. Somewhere.
A thick thread of the American experience has
always been to hold the rest of the world at
arm’s length, whether in economics, technology
or cultural exchange. The truth is, this nation

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has always been a bit of an island, a place where
multilingualism, or even holding a passport, is
less common than in many other lands.
Now, the notion of a virus that came from a
distant “elsewhere” stands to carve deeper
grooves into that landscape.

“It’s a continuation of the same kinds of fears

that we have had,” says Jennifer Sciubba, an
international studies professor at Rhodes
College in Memphis, Tennessee. “We’ve seen this
conversation before.”

As the outbreak worsens by the day, the United

States, like other nations, is drawing quite
literally inward. With little ability to plan and
increasing numbers of Americans out of work,
that’s a natural reaction. “The coronavirus is
killing globalization as we know it,” one foreign-
affairs journal said.

It’s unlikely that much of the globalization that

touches Americans daily — the parts in their
iPhones, the cheap consumer goods, the out-of-
season fruit in their produce aisles, the ability to
communicate around the world virtually — is
going anywhere, at least for good.
But a protracted period of coronavirus anxiety
and impact will almost certainly redraw — and
in many cases reinforce — opinions about the
wider world’s role in American lives.
Throughout its 244-year existence, America’s
relationship with the rest of the world has
been marked by the tension between working
together with other nations, or going it alone as
a land of “rugged individualists.”

Isolationism was, in fact, a dominant American

policy until the 20th century — except when it

183
wasn’t, like when those millions of immigrants
arrived from Germany, Ireland, Italy, Eastern
Europe and other somewhere elses to
become American.

Geography played a role in early isolationist

attitudes. Insulated by oceans, the United
States bordered only two nations, which
often meant no regular exposure to people
who were different. What’s more, many
communities, particularly on the frontier,
had to be insular to survive — even as they
desperately needed goods from “civilization”
back East.

The most obvious motivation, however, is

economic, in the form of a perceived loss
of opportunities.

Since the Industrial Revolution’s beginnings

in the 19th century, chunks of the population
have exhibited wariness of outsiders willing to
work for less and take jobs from longer-term
Americans. That has proven fertile ground for
populist politicians to exploit.

Finally, of course, there’s fear — of an unknown

other, the kind that allows a word like “globalism”
to evolve into a sinister, sometimes anti-
Semitic epithet. “It’s a human condition to
fear the unknown. So people clump it all into
‘danger’ or ‘stay away’,” says Jeffrey Martinson, a
political scientist at Meredith College in Raleigh,
North Carolina.
The important thing to remember, advocates
of engagement say, is this: Since World War II
in particular, Americans have benefited from
the fruits of engagement as much as they’ve
suffered from its detriments.

184
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“The pandemic has shown that illness and other
aspects of life now can’t be stopped by borders,”
says Scott Wilson, a political scientist at the
University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee,
who helps lead the institution’s global initiatives.
“It has shown the importance of integration in
terms of the response,” Wilson says. “Without
global institutions and global cooperation, we
would be in much worse shape. … We can’t turn
that back.”

So what happens next? Presuming American

society emerges from the spring (and summer?)
of coronavirus largely intact, where does its
global-engagement discussion go?

Jonathan Cristol, a research fellow at Adelphi

University’s Levermore Global Scholars Program
in New York, predicts that the coronavirus will
“provide ammunition for all sides.”

“People … opposed to globalization and free

trade will use the spread of the pathogen as
an argument for why we need to roll back
globalization. That will be framed in terms
of immigration, in terms of anti-Chinese
sentiment,” he says. “And the people who
favor interconnectedness will use the working
together toward a common purpose as a way to
back up their argument.”

One side effect of the virus era may actually

stimulate globalization. Stripped of their ability
to travel or meet in person, humans have
doubled down on virtual communication more

186
fundamentally than ever. That means the person
two doors down presents in the same way as
the one two continents away — as a pixelated
image on a screen.

“I could see the shift to online work actually

encouraging links around the world,” says
Stephen L.S. Smith, an economist at Hope College
in Michigan who focuses on global trade. “It could
end with a deeper globalization, but one that was
more cognizant with security risks.”

That’s the question in a post-virus United

States, a more distilled version of its pre-COVID
counterpart: How to shape the American place
in the world to benefit as many as possible
without compromising the control and
sovereignty so valued by many in a land that
sometimes considers itself an exception to
global rules?

“If the pandemic teaches us nothing else,

it shows that we are all in this together. We
are all vulnerable to forces like this,” says
Betty Cruz, president and CEO of the World
Affairs Council of Pittsburgh, which fosters
international engagement.
“Insularity isn’t something that we can afford.
Period,” Cruz says. “The entire nation can’t afford
to not be globally connected. So it’s not how do
we get back to normal, but how do we create a
new normal with connections that are deeper
than before?”

187
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 WITH NO
THEATERS, FILM
FANS FIND WAYS
TO GATHER
VIRTUALLY

There are 44 people in the Social Distance

Movie Club’s Slack channel, where co-workers
at Crooked Media have had discussions about
everything from a Dwayne Johnson earthquake
film to Faye Dunaway’s turn as Joan Crawford in
“Mommie Dearest.”

It doesn’t have anything to do with the work

that’s done at the Los Angeles company, which
produces podcasts like Pod Save America (it’s
also helped raise over $1 million for coronavirus
relief ). But for the past few weeks of working

189
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from home, it’s become a way for the staff to
pause the news and escape into the world of
film together.
With theaters closed and most of the country
staying home, virtual viewing parties are surging
in popularity. They simulate the experience of
going out to the movies, and you don’t even
have to pass the popcorn.

Michael Martinez, Crooked Media’s executive

producer for news and politics, got the Social
Distance Movie Club going with The Rock in “San
Andreas.” Since then, they’ve viewed “National
Treasure” and “Road House.”

“It started as a funny thing to do,” Martinez said.

“But it’s preserved part of the experience of
being at the office when you talk to someone in
the kitchen about, say, the Keanu Reeves movie
you watched the weekend before.”

It’s not just friends and co-workers, either.

Movie studios, actors and even some
publications are bringing people together
online around the shared viewing of a film
through Twitter hashtags, long a staple of
appointment television.
MGM Studios two weeks ago held a “Legally
Blonde” watch party, streaming the beloved
Reese Witherspoon comedy for free on
Facebook on a Friday morning.
Stephen Bruno, the chief marketing officer
at MGM, said they were looking for ways to
entertain and decided to mine their library
for joyous titles. “Legally Blonde” was an
obvious choice.

When they reached out to Witherspoon to see if

she’d be on board, Bruno paraphrased the star:

191
“She said something to the effect of, ’Everybody
could use a little Elle Woods positivity right
now.” Witherspoon and her co-star Victor Garber
helped views spike with social media mentions.

And people turned out, with as many as 1.1

million tuning in over the course of the film, with
a peak of 22,300 simultaneous views.
“We were impressed with the numbers,” said
Bruno. “The hope is we can do more.”

Focus Features tried it out with “Emma,” enlisting

Turner Classic Movies host Alicia Malone to
lead a discussion on Twitter at a designated
time. But viewers had to rent that title for
$19.99 if they wanted to follow along. The
studio is also starting Movie Mondays, a free
series, on Facebook, with links to donate to the
Entertainment Industry Foundation’s COVID-19
Response Fund. Movies include “Moonrise
Kingdom,” on April 13 at 8PM EST.

Not everyone is putting pressure on watching

together, though. The American Film Institute
started the AFI Movie Club that is curating daily
selections with high-profile introductions, from
Steven Spielberg to Brad Pitt.
Availability of movies online can be an issue. It’s
one thing for a group of people to agree on a
film. It’s another find one that’s also streaming
on a site where everyone is signed up with
an account.

That’s a problem that film writer Tomris Laffly

encountered with her group of friends. Instead
of Slack, they watch together through the
application “Netflix Party,” a Google Chrome
extension that lets multiple computers
stream the same film simultaneously with a

192
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chat window on the side of the screen. The
only catch is that it has to be on Netflix for it
to work.
“It looks like there’s a lot to watch on the Netflix
library, but there actually isn’t when you boil it
down to movies that everybody wants to see,”
Laffly said.
So far they’ve watched “Magnolia,”“Tootsie”
and “Kingpin.”

Time zones can also prove challenging. Her

group of eight people are all in New York. It’s
been more difficult scheduling something
with her sister, who lives in California and has a
3-year-old.
Billy Donnelly, a film fan in North Carolina,
curated his own coronavirus-themed film
festival for friends and family from movies
available on Amazon Prime and Netflix that they
could then come back and discuss together on
Facebook or Instagram.

“They could do it on their own time, at their own

pace,” he said. “We need human contact right
now and this is close.”

The films included “Groundhog Day,”

“Miracle Mile,”“Space Jam,”“The Interview”
and “Snowpiercer.”

The virtual viewing parties have provided

a welcome distraction for many in these
homebound times. But it’s not necessarily a
permanent substitute for the alternative.

“Everybody is just really excited to have

something to do,” Laffly said. “Afterwards
hopefully we can continue, but
in person.”

194
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196
 JAPAN’S STATE
OF EMERGENCY IS
NO LOCKDOWN.
WHAT’S IN IT?

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has declared a state

of emergency in Tokyo and six other hard-
hit Japanese prefectures to fortify the fight
against the coronavirus outbreak. But this is no
European or Wuhan-style lockdown. A look at
what Japan’s state of emergency entails:
Q. WHY DID ABE DECLARE A STATE
OF EMERGENCY?
A. Abe was facing heavy pressure to declare a
state of emergency after the number of new
cases in Tokyo began doubling every several
days in late March. The city of 14 million had
1,339 cases as of Wednesday, up from about 600
a week earlier. Japan focused on dealing with
clusters of infections and selective testing for the
virus, a strategy that has failed to curb its spread.

197
Experts found that one-third of Tokyo’s recent
cases were linked to hostess clubs and other
night entertainment districts where cluster
tracing is difficult. Meanwhile, compliance with
calls for working remotely and other social
distancing has been weak.

Q. IS ALL OF JAPAN AFFECTED?

A. The state of emergency announced Tuesday
applies to only Tokyo, neighboring Chiba,
Kanagawa and Saitama, Osaka, and Hyogo in
the west and Fukuoka in the south. That is only
seven of Japan’s 47 prefectures. Residents are
requested to avoid nonessential trips within
and outside the designated areas, but there are
no restrictions on travel. Some Tokyo residents
drew criticism for rushing to escape from Tokyo
to the countryside.
Q. DOES A STATE OF EMERGENCY CAUSE A
TOKYO LOCKDOWN?

A. No, Abe and officials say Japan cannot legally

enforce hard lockdowns. Public transportation
is operating as normal. Most state of emergency
measures are requests and instructions. Violators
cannot be punished unless they fail to comply
with orders related to storage or shipment of
emergency relief goods and medical supplies.

Q. WHY IS JAPAN NOT IMPOSING A

HARD LOCKDOWN?
A. Japan’s history of repression under fascist
governments before and during World War II has
left the public wary of government overreach.
The country’s postwar constitution lays out strict
protections for civil liberties. Abe’s government
was reluctant to risk severe economic
repercussions from more severe measures.

198
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200
Q. WHAT MEASURES ARE TAKEN IN A STATE
OF EMERGENCY?
A. The state of emergency allows prefectural
leaders to ask residents to stay home. They
can also request closures of schools, some
child and senior care or community centers,
and stores and businesses that are considered
nonessential. They can advise organizers to
cancel or postpone events. The governors can
also request use of private property to build
hospitals and other medical facilities.

Q. WHAT ARE ESSENTIAL ACTIVITIES?

A. Essential activities and facilities, including
banks, grocery stores, postal services,
pharmacies and utility companies, remain
open. Some retail stores and entertainment
venues such as movie theaters, concert halls and
amusement parks can be asked to shut down.
Public schools in Tokyo and some neighboring
prefectures already are closed until at least
early May.

Q. CAN PEOPLE STILL GO OUT?

A. Yes, residents can go out for purposes

considered essential, including work, hospital
visits and grocery shopping, according to
a Cabinet Office statement. Residents in
designated areas can still go out for a walk, a jog
or other individual exercise.
Q. HOW EFFECTIVE IS THE MEASURE?
A. Abe on Wednesday repeated his request for
the people to stay home and reduce interactions
with others by up to 80%. But in Tokyo’s
downtown Shibuya district, business was almost
normal. Rush hour trains were still crowded and
commuters were heading to work, though fewer

201
people were seen in other areas of the capital.
Akihito Aminaka, an education industry worker,
said heeding Abe’s request was difficult because
“to me, it sounds like they’re saying, ‘Please don’t
go out, but we won’t help you.’”
Q. WHAT’S THE POTENTIAL
ECONOMIC IMPACT?
A. Abe also announced an unprecedented
108 trillion yen ($1 trillion) stimulus package,
equivalent to about a fifth of Japan’s annual
GDP, to pay for coronavirus measures and
protect businesses and jobs. It includes
300,000 yen ($2,750) cash handouts for
some hard-hit households. A monthlong
state of emergency in the Tokyo area could
cause consumer spending to fall nearly 2.5
trillion yen ($23 billion), according to Nomura
Research Institute.

202
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BLEACHING ON
GREAT BARRIER
REEF MORE
WIDESPREAD
THAN EVER

An aerial survey of the Great Barrier Reef shows

coral bleaching is sweeping across the area off
the east of Australia for the third time in five years.
Bleaching has struck all three regions of the
world’s largest coral reef system and is more
widespread than ever, scientists from James Cook
University in Queensland state said this week.
The air surveys of 1,036 reefs in the past two
weeks found bleached coral in the northern,
central and southern areas, James Cook
University professor Terry Hughes said.
“As summers grow hotter and hotter, we no longer
need an El Nino event to trigger mass bleaching at
the scale of the Great Barrier Reef,” Hughes said. “Of
the five events we have seen so far, only 1998 and
2016 occurred during El Nino conditions.”
El Nino is a climate pattern that starts with a
band of warm ocean water in the central and
east-central Pacific around the equator and
affects global weather.

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The Great Barrier Reef is made up of 2,900
separate reefs and 900 islands. It is unable
to recover because there is not enough time
between bleaching events.
“We have already seen the first example of back-
to-back bleaching — in the consecutive summers
of 2016 and 2017,” Hughes said, adding that
the number of reefs spared from bleaching is
shrinking as it becomes more widespread.
He said underwater surveys will be carried out
later in the year to assess the extent of damage.
In early March, David Wachenfeld, chief scientist
at the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority,
said the reef was facing a critical period of heat
stress over the coming weeks following the most
widespread coral bleaching the natural wonder
has ever endured.
The authority, the government agency that
manages the coral expanse off northeast
Australia, said ocean temperatures over the next
month would be crucial to how the reef recovers
from heat-induced bleaching.
“The forecasts ... indicate that we can expect
ongoing levels of thermal stress for at least
the next two weeks and maybe three or four
weeks,” Wachenfeld said in a weekly update on
the reef’s health.
“So this still is a critical time for the reef and it
is the weather conditions over the next two
to four weeks that will determine the final
outcome,” he said.
Ocean temperatures across most of the reef
were 0.5 to 1.5 degrees Celsius (0.9 to 2.7
degrees Fahrenheit) above the March average.
In parts of the marine park in the south close
to shore that avoided the ravages of previous

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bleachings, ocean temperatures were 2 to 3
degrees Celsius (3.6 to 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit)
above average.
The authority had received 250 reports of
sightings of bleached coral due to elevated ocean
temperatures during an unusually hot February.
The 345,400-square kilometer (133,360-square
mile) World Heritage-listed colorful coral
network has been devastated by four coral
bleaching events since 1998. The most deadly
were the most recent, in those consecutive
summers of 2016 and 2017.

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