First Edition: May 7, 2020

Kaiser Health News: Economic Blow Of The Coronavirus Hits America’s Already Stressed Farmers
Richard Oswald, still mourning the loss of his family’s homestead to flooding along the Missouri River, is planting corn and soybeans into ground that last year was feet deep underwater. It’s probably good, he said, to not have too much time to think. “Diversion therapy is the best treatment for farmers right now,” said the 70-year-old from Atchison County, Missouri. “Being busy helps.” (West, 5/7)

Kaiser Health News: How The Pandemic And An Anti-Vax Health Official Are Roiling A Montana Community
Even as Montana begins a gradual easing of stay-at-home restrictions intended to curb the spread of the coronavirus, the political schism it highlighted is creating reverberations in one community in the northwestern corner of the state. A Flathead County health board member who led a movement to disparage the protective safety orders and downplay the virus is now the subject of two competing petitions — one to expel her from office and another to keep her. (McLaughlin, 5/7)

The New York Times: Supreme Court Divided Over Obamacare’s Contraceptive Mandate 
The Supreme Court heard arguments on Wednesday about whether the Trump administration may allow employers with religious or moral objections to deny women free birth control coverage under the Affordable Care Act. The case returned the court to a key battle in the culture wars, one entering its second decade and one in which successive administrations have switched sides. According to government estimates, about 70,000 to 126,000 women would lose contraceptive coverage from their employers if the Trump administration prevails. (Liptak, 5/6)

The Associated Press: Justices Wary Of 'Obamacare' Birth Control Coverage Changes
The Supreme Court’s four liberal justices suggested they were troubled by the changes, which the government has estimated would cause about 70,000 women, and at most 126,000 women, to lose contraception coverage in one year. Chief Justice John Roberts, a key vote on a court split between conservatives and liberals, suggested that the Trump administration’s reliance on a federal religious freedom law to expand the exemption was “too broad.” (Gresko and Sherman, 5/6)

Reuters: U.S. Supreme Court Wrestles With Obamacare Contraception Case
Liberal Justices Elena Kagan and Stephen Breyer appeared to favor a similar approach. “I don’t understand why this can’t be worked out,” Breyer said. The contraceptive mandate under the law, which was signed by Obama in 2010 and has faced Republican efforts to repeal it ever since, requires that employer-provided health insurance include coverage for birth control with no co-payment. Previously, many employer-provided insurance policies did not offer this coverage. (Hurley, 5/6)

The Washington Post: Trump Vows To End Obamacare At Supreme Court Despite Pandemic
President Trump said Wednesday he will continue trying to toss out all of the Affordable Care Act, even as some in his administration, including Attorney General William P. Barr, have privately argued parts of the law should be preserved amid a pandemic. “We want to terminate health care under Obamacare,” Trump told reporters Wednesday, the last day for his administration to change its position in a Supreme Court case challenging the law. “Obamacare, we run it really well. . . . But running it great, it’s still lousy health care.” (Barrett, 5/6)

The New York Times: Trump’s New Message: Time To Move On To The Economic Recovery
Confronted with America’s worst public health crisis in generations, President Trump declared himself a wartime president. Now he has begun doing what past commanders have done when a war goes badly: Declare victory and go home. The war, however, does not seem over. Outside New York, the coronavirus pandemic in the United States is still growing, not receding. The latest death toll estimates have more than doubled from what Mr. Trump predicted just weeks ago. And polls show the public is not ready to restore normal life. (Baker, 5/6)

The Hill: Trump Backs Off Plans To Wind Down Task Force After Backlash 
President Trump on Wednesday said he backed off plans to dissolve the White House coronavirus task force after public outcry, saying he didn't realize how "popular" the group of medical experts and government leaders was. "I thought we could wind it down sooner," Trump told reporters during an Oval Office event recognizing National Nurses Day. "But I had no idea how popular the task force is until actually yesterday when I started talking about winding down. ... It is appreciated by the public." (Samuels, 5/6)

The Wall Street Journal: Trump Says Task Force Will Focus On Reopening The U.S.
In tweets Wednesday morning, Mr. Trump praised Mr. Pence’s work on the task force. “Because of this success, the Task Force will continue on indefinitely with its focus on SAFETY & OPENING UP OUR COUNTRY AGAIN,” he wrote. He added that the task force’s membership could change. Mr. Trump has urged more states to open up and has said he plans to start traveling more around the country. Lockdowns in many states in the U.S. have begun to ease. (Ansari, Lin and Kalin, 5/6)

The Associated Press: In Reversal, Trump Says Virus Task Force To Stay But Evolve
The indecision on the fate of the expert panel was emblematic of an administration — and a country — struggling with competing priorities of averting more death and more economic suffering. Trump appears focused on persuading Americans to accept the price of some lives lost as restrictions are eased, concerned about skyrocketing unemployment and intent on encouraging an economic rebound ahead of the November election. (Miller, Colvin and Superville, 5/6)

Reuters: Trump To Refocus Coronavirus Task Force On Economic Revival, Concedes Risks
Asked later if Americans will have to accept that reopening will lead to more deaths, Trump told reporters: “You have to be warriors. We can’t keep our country closed down for years and we have to do something. Hopefully that won’t be the case, but it could very well be the case.” Governors have faced mounting pressure to ease stay-at-home orders and mandatory business closures that have ravaged the economy, throwing millions of Americans out of work, even as those measures succeeded in fighting the virus. (Mason and Chiacu, 5/6)

Politico: Trump Kicks Off A Day Of Whiplash Over Future Of Coronavirus Task Force
The task force will soon be dead. The task force will mutate. The task force will be replaced by multiple task forces. Over the last 24 hours, the White House rolled out a variety of shifting messages and confusing justifications about what would become of its coronavirus task force, some members of which have become the admired face of the Trump administration’s response to the pandemic. (Oprysko, Ehley, Roubein and Forgey, 5/6)

The Hill: Fauci's Absence From Hearing Draws Bipartisan Rebuke From House Lawmakers 
A key House panel held a hearing Wednesday on the country's response to the coronavirus pandemic but had to do so without testimony from any members of the Trump administration. The absences of key figures in the battle against COVID-19 — including Anthony Fauci, the administration's top infectious diseases expert — prompted frustration from members of both parties. (Hellmann, 5/6)

The Associated Press: AP Exclusive: Admin Shelves CDC Guide To Reopening Country
A set of detailed documents created by the nation’s top disease investigators meant to give step-by-step advice to local leaders deciding when and how to reopen public places such as mass transit, day care centers and restaurants during the still-raging pandemic has been shelved by the Trump administration. The 17-page report by a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention team, titled “Guidance for Implementing the Opening Up America Again Framework,” was researched and written to help faith leaders, business owners, educators and state and local officials as they begin to reopen. (Dearen and Stobbe, 5/7)

Reuters: Trump Calls Ousted Whistleblower Bright A 'Disgruntled Employee'
U.S. President Donald Trump said on Wednesday an ousted health official who filed a whistleblower’s complaint accusing the administration of retaliating when he voiced concerns about the coronavirus in January seemed to be a disgruntled person who wants to help Democrats. (Mason and Wolfe, 5/6)

The Associated Press: Esper, In First Trip Since March, Defends Antivirus Efforts
Defense Secretary Mark Esper is traveling beyond Washington for the first time in nearly two months as he looks to highlight and defend a Pentagon approach to fighting the coronavirus pandemic that some Senate Democrats have criticized as slow and disjointed. Esper was flying Thursday to the headquarters of U.S. Northern Command in Colorado Springs, Colorado, to meet with Gen. Terrence O’Shaughnessy, who is spearheading the military’s support for civilian agencies combating the virus. It is Esper’s first trip beyond Washington since he visited Norfolk, Virginia, in late March to join President Donald Trump in sending off a Navy hospital ship. (Burns, 5/7)

Politico: Democrats Demand Intel On Coronavirus Origins
Top Democratic lawmakers say the Trump administration should share with Congress the allegedly “enormous” evidence showing that the coronavirus sprang from a Chinese lab. Otherwise, they warn, the administration should quit hyping questionable information. The demands come as President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo push the theory that Covid-19 somehow emerged from a Chinese lab that studied such viruses. Their claims are leading some critics to draw comparisons to the misleading way the administration of George W. Bush argued the case for the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. (Toosi and Bertrand, 5/6)

The Wall Street Journal: Coronavirus Casts Deep Chill Over U.S.-China Relations
Relations between the U.S. and China, strained for years, have deteriorated at a rapid clip in recent months, leaving the two nations with fewer shared interests and a growing list of conflicts. The Trump administration has moved to involve much of the U.S. government in a campaign that includes investigations, prosecutions and export restrictions. Nearly every cabinet and cabinet-level official either has adopted adversarial positions or jettisoned past cooperative programs with Beijing, an analysis of their policies showed. (O'Keeffe, Bender and Wong, 5/6)

NPR: U.S. Was Behind On Payments To WHO Before Trump's Cutoff
In mid-April, when President Trump declared, "Today I'm instructing my administration to halt funding of the World Health Organization," Jimmy Kolker did a double take. "We were already in arrears before he said anything," says Kolker, who was an assistant secretary for global health affairs during the Obama administration. (Welna, 5/7)

Politico: Trump Boosters: Don’t Believe The Coronavirus Death Toll
An increasing number of conservatives are convinced the medical community and the media are inflating the coronavirus death toll for political purposes, despite nearly all evidence indicating that, if anything, the figure is an undercount. The conspiracy theory started with those who argued the figure was being manipulated, before morphing into a more generalized suspicion about coronavirus modeling among Republicans. Fox News has begun to feature a constant drumbeat of doubt about the reliability of any model, and President Donald Trump on Sunday called the models “wrong from day one” and “out of whack,” but insisted on Tuesday he believed the government’s death toll. (Nguyen, 5/7)

The Washington Post: America's Coronavirus Divide Is Reflected In Two New Mexico Mayors. One Asked For A Lockdown. The Other Defied Orders.
Louie Bonaguidi had been mayor of this tiny city set among high desert buttes and Native American reservations for just a matter of hours last week when the governor called. “I want to congratulate you on your election,” New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham told him. “And give my condolences, because we’re locking your city down.” Bonaguidi was not disappointed to hear that state troopers would be deployed to blockade all roads into Gallup. He was relieved: This was the only way, he believed, to stop local hospitals from spinning out of control during a novel coronavirus outbreak that already had overwhelmed them. (Klemko and Witte, 5/6)

The New York Times: Most States That Are Reopening Fail To Meet White House Guidelines
More than half of U.S. states have begun to reopen their economies or plan to do so soon. But most fail to meet criteria recommended by the Trump administration to resume business and social activities. The White House’s guidelines are nonbinding and ultimately leave states’ fates to governors. The criteria suggest that states should have a “downward trajectory” of either documented cases or of the percentage of positive tests. (Collins and Leatherby, 5/7)

Reuters: New York Governor Says Some States Are Making A Mistake By Reopening
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said on Wednesday that he believed states reopening their economies while seeing growing rates of infections from the novel coronavirus were making a mistake. “You have states that are opening where you are still on the incline,” Cuomo told a daily briefing. “I think that’s a mistake.” (5/6)

The Wall Street Journal: Poll Finds Majority Of Tri-State Residents Think It’s Too Soon To Reopen
A majority of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut residents think it is too soon to reopen their states and said officials should instead prioritize curbing the spread of the coronavirus, according to new polling. More than 50% of tri-state residents said it would take a few months or longer before lifting restrictions on businesses is safe, according to a poll released Wednesday by Quinnipiac University. Fewer than 40% of residents said the region should reopen immediately or in the next few weeks, according to the poll. (De Avila, 5/6)

The Washington Post: Arizona Halts Partnership With Experts Predicting Coronavirus Cases Would Continue To Mount
Hours after Doug Ducey, the Republican governor of Arizona, accelerated plans to reopen businesses, saying the state was “headed in the right direction,” his administration halted the work of a team of experts projecting it was on a different — and much grimmer — course. On Monday night, the eve of President Trump’s visit to the state, Ducey’s health department shut down the work of academic experts predicting the peak of the state’s coronavirus outbreak was still about two weeks away. (Stanley-Becker and Weiner, 5/6)

Reuters: WHO Warns Against Rushed End To Coronavirus Lockdowns
The World Health Organization (WHO) warned on Wednesday that countries emerging from restrictions to halt the new coronavirus must proceed “extremely carefully” or risk a rapid rise in new cases. Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said countries needed to ensure they had adequate measures to control the spread of the COVID-19 respiratory disease like tracking systems and quarantine provision. (Revill and Farge, 5/6)

Reuters: Will Gilead Price Its Coronavirus Drug For Public Good Or Company Profit?
Gilead Sciences Inc (GILD.O) faces a new dilemma in deciding how much it should profit from the only treatment so far proven to help patients infected with the novel coronavirus. The drugmaker earned notoriety less than a decade ago, when it introduced a treatment that essentially cured hepatitis C at a price of $1,000 per pill. Public outrage over the cost of Sovaldi in 2013 - despite that it was a vast improvement over existing equally expensive therapies - ignited a national debate on fair pricing for prescription medicines that the pharmaceutical industry has fought to deflect ever since. (Beasley, 5/6)

Politico: Remdesivir Helps Coronavirus Patients — But At What Cost?
Gilead has rocketed into the public consciousness with one of the most promising coronavirus treatments, but the company’s history of sky high drug pricing is drawing increasing scrutiny from Congress about how much it will charge for remdesivir and who will get access. But Gilead, which suffered through a spate of bad publicity in 2015 for charging $84,000 for a hepatitis C drug, isn’t just under fire over the potential price of its coronavirus treatment. It’s under pressure from Wall Street investors to recoup the $1 billion investment in remdesivir, which has been proven to accelerate recovery from the coronavirus. How Gilead navigates financial pressures from investors and political pressures from Washington may very well determine the mass production and availability of one of the most promising coronavirus drugs on the market. (Brennan, 5/6)

Stat: Doctors Lambaste Process For Distributing Covid-19 Drug Remdesivir
Hospitals and physicians around the country are sharply criticizing the federal government for the uneven and opaque way it is distributing its supply of the Covid-19 drug remdesivir. The experimental drug received an emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration last week, after preliminary data from a clinical trial showed that it reduced how long it took hospitalized Covid-19 patients to recover. Now, as the drug’s producer, Gilead Sciences, tries to ramp up production, the U.S. government is starting to distribute the limited number of vials that aren’t needed for ongoing research, so that patients can start to see the benefit outside of clinical trials. About two dozen hospitals are believed to have been chosen to receive the drug so far, but clinicians told STAT it is unclear why some medical centers were chosen to receive coveted doses while others weren’t — and who is making those decisions in the first place. (Boodman and Ross, 5/6)

ProPublica: How Climate Change Is Contributing To Skyrocketing Rates Of Infectious Disease
The scientists who study how diseases emerge in a changing environment knew this moment was coming. Climate change is making outbreaks of disease more common and more dangerous. Over the past few decades, the number of emerging infectious diseases that spread to people — especially coronaviruses and other respiratory illnesses believed to have come from bats and birds — has skyrocketed. A new emerging disease surfaces five times a year. One study estimates that more than 3,200 strains of coronaviruses already exist among bats, awaiting an opportunity to jump to people. (Lustgarten, 5/7)

The Hill: Evidence Mounts That Outside Is Safer When It Comes To COVID-19
Health experts say people are significantly less likely to get the coronavirus while outside, a fact that could add momentum to calls to reopen beaches and parks closed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Being outside shouldn’t be seen as completely safe, health experts say. People should continue to avoid crowds and maintain six feet of distance from others to keep away from the virus. But experts are increasingly confident in evidence showing that the coronavirus spreads much more readily indoors than outdoors, a finding that could help guide policymakers seeking to figure out ways to end lockdowns that have shuttered much of the nation’s economy.(Sullivan, 5/6)

Stat: Amazon Lends Its Expertise — And Its Cash — To Covid-19 Research 
Shipping behemoth Amazon is increasingly throwing its weight into the pandemic response, sharing its staff’s web and research design expertise with scientists across the country and digging into its deep pockets to fund a smattering of Covid-19 studies and projects. The company is backing a wide range of efforts, from funding a clinical trial of blood plasma from recovered Covid-19 patients to delivering at-home coronavirus tests to health workers and others in the U.K. Much of Amazon’s work is focused on people at a high risk of being exposed to the virus, such as delivery drivers, grocery store staff, and health care workers — all roles that exist within Amazon and its subsidiaries. (Brodwin, 5/7)

The Washington Post: Kizzmekia Corbett Is Leading NIH's Team To Find A Coronavirus Vaccine
Halfway through the school year, Myrtis Bradsher found herself paying close attention to a little girl called Kizzy. She always looked sharp, with ribbons knotted to her ponytails and socks that matched every outfit. But it was the way she rushed to help other fourth-graders with classwork that really stood out. “She had so much knowledge,” the teacher recalled. “She knew something about everything. ”In 25 years at Oak Lane Elementary School in rural Hurdle Mills, N.C., Bradsher had not seen a child like her. Bradsher was one of a few black teachers, and Kizzy was a rare black student. At a parent-teacher conference, Bradsher pushed to give the girl the advantages she felt she deserved. (Fears, 5/6)

The New York Times: Hoping Llamas Will Become Coronavirus Heroes
Winter is a 4-year-old chocolate-colored llama with spindly legs, ever-so-slightly askew ears and envy-inducing eyelashes. Some scientists hope she might be an important figure in the fight against the novel coronavirus. She is not a superpowered camelid. Winter was simply the lucky llama chosen by researchers in Belgium, where she lives, to participate in a series of virus studies involving both SARS and MERS. Finding that her antibodies staved off those infections, the scientists posited that those same antibodies could also neutralize the new virus that causes Covid-19. They were right, and published their results Tuesday in the journal Cell. (Kramer, 5/6)

Stat: Giving Blood Thinners To Severely Ill Covid-19 Patients Is Gaining Ground
Treating Covid-19 patients with medicines to prevent blood clots might help reduce deaths in patients on ventilators, based on new observational data. A team from Mount Sinai Health System in New York on Wednesday reported better results for hospitalized Covid-19 patients who received anticoagulant drugs compared to patients who didn’t. The data are preliminary and require confirmation in larger studies with a more robust design, the authors say about their study published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, but their findings add weight to medical guidelines. (Cooney, 5/6)

The Wall Street Journal: Unproven Coronavirus Cures Flood U.S. Regulators
Gordon Pedersen wore a white lab coat and stethoscope and billed himself as a doctor in online videos he made to promote his own brand of drinks and gels containing silver particles, which he claimed could destroy the new coronavirus. Authorities in his home state of Utah, however, say he has no medical degree or license, and his products—concoctions they describe as water, baking soda and silver extracted from wire and sold for $299.95 a gallon—were a sham. On April 27, federal prosecutors charged him with fraud. (Alpert, 5/7)

The New York Times: Did A Mutation Turbocharge The Coronavirus? Not Likely, Scientists Say
All viruses mutate, and the coronavirus is no exception. But there is no compelling evidence yet that it is evolving in a way that has made it more contagious or more deadly. A preprint study — posted online, but not published in a scientific journal and not yet peer-reviewed — has set the internet afire by suggesting otherwise. On April 30, a report by a team led by Bette Korber, a biologist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, claimed to have found a mutation in the coronavirus that arose in Europe in February and then rapidly spread, becoming dominant as the virus was introduced into new countries. (Zimmer, 5/6)

Reuters: New Coronavirus Spread Swiftly Around World From Late 2019, Study Finds
A genetic study of samples from more than 7,500 people infected with COVID-19 suggests the new coronavirus spread quickly around the world after it emerged in China sometime between October and December last year, scientists said on Wednesday. Scientists at University College London’s Genetics Institute found almost 200 recurrent genetic mutations of the new coronavirus - SARS-CoV-2 - which the UCL researchers said showed how it is adapting to its human hosts as it spreads. (Kelland, 5/6)

The New York Times: ‘Covid-19 Parties’ Probably Didn’t Involve Intentional Spread
Amid growing impatience over stay-at-home orders and rising unemployment, public health experts have worried that some people may try to expose themselves to the coronavirus in a risky bid to gain immunity. One fear is the prospect of “coronavirus parties,” much like the chickenpox parties of the past that preceded the development of a chickenpox vaccine, designed to deliberately spread infection. (Baker, 5/6)

The Wall Street Journal: New York Survey Yields New Insights Into Who’s Getting Infected With Covid-19
A majority of the New Yorkers hospitalized in recent days for the novel coronavirus weren’t working and had been living in their homes, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Wednesday, offering new insights into who is getting infected with the virus. The number of new coronavirus patients entering hospitals in the state each day declined to around 600 this week from more than 900 last week, when the Democratic governor ordered the survey. It included 1,269 respondents at 113 hospitals earlier this week. (Vielkind and De Avila, 5/6)

The New York Times: UnitedHealth Customers Will See A Discount On Next Month’s Bill
With so many of its customers struggling during the pandemic, UnitedHealth Group, one of the nation’s largest health insurers whose profits have not suffered during the crisis, is offering modest relief. On Thursday it said it would make $1.5 billion worth of premium credits and fees for doctor’s visits available to people enrolled in its plans.“ People are hurting right now,” said David S. Wichmann, UnitedHealth’s chief executive, in a call with reporters on Wednesday night. “Employers are hurting. Individual consumers are hurting.” (Abelson, 5/7)

The Wall Street Journal: UnitedHealth To Give Customers $1.5 Billion Of Discounts
UnitedHealth said it would also waive cost sharing, such as copayments, for specialist and primary-care doctor visits by people enrolled in its Medicare Advantage plans, through at least the end of September. “Taken together, these actions will help people get and pay for health care,” said David Wichmann, chief executive of UnitedHealth. (Wilde Mathews, 5/7)

The Associated Press: Democrats Make Case For Role Of Government In Virus Response
When he stood before Congress in 1996 and declared “the era of big government is over,” President Bill Clinton gave voice to a doctrine that permeated Democratic politics for more than two decades. Government, while necessary, shouldn’t be celebrated if the party wanted to win elections. The coronavirus is changing that. (Barrow and Fram, 5/7)

The New York Times: Unemployment Numbers Will Be Terrible. Here's What You Need To Know.
The coronavirus pandemic has brought wave after wave of catastrophic economic data: The worst decline in gross domestic product in a decade. The worst retail sales report on record. The worst week ever for unemployment claims, and then two more twice as bad as that. But even by those recent standards, the April jobs numbers could stand out. Economists surveyed by MarketWatch expect the report, which the Labor Department will release on Friday, to show that U.S. payrolls fell by 22 million jobs last month — a decade’s worth of job gains, wiped out in weeks. (Casselman, 5/6)

The Associated Press: April Jobs Data To Show Epic Losses And Soaring Unemployment
Many people still employed have had their hours reduced. Others have suffered pay cuts. Some who’ve lost jobs won’t have been able to look for work amid widespread shutdowns and won’t even be counted as unemployed. A broader measure — the proportion of adults with jobs — could plunge to a record low. “What we’re talking about here is pretty stunning,” said Diane Swonk, chief economist at Grant Thornton. “The shock is unique because the cause is unique. It’s such a different animal from anything that we’ve ever seen.” (Rugaber, 5/6)

The New York Times: As Hunger Swells, Food Stamps Become A Partisan Flash Point
As a padlocked economy leaves millions of Americans without paychecks, lines outside food banks have stretched for miles, prompting some of the overwhelmed charities to seek help from the National Guard. New research shows a rise in food insecurity without modern precedent. Among mothers with young children, nearly one-fifth say their children are not getting enough to eat, according to a survey by the Brookings Institution, a rate three times as high as in 2008, during the worst of the Great Recession. The reality of so many Americans running out of food is an alarming reminder of the economic hardship the pandemic has inflicted. (DeParle, 5/6)

The New York Times: E.U. Is Facing Its Worst Recession Ever. Watch Out, World. 
The good news for Europe is that the worst of the pandemic is beginning to ease. This week deaths in Italy hit a nearly two-month low. And the German leader Angela Merkel announced that schools, day care centers and restaurants would reopen in the next few days.But the relief could be short-lived. The European Commission released projections on Wednesday that Europe’s economy will shrink by 7.4 percent this year. A top official told residents of the European Union, first formed in the aftermath of the Second World War, to expect the “deepest economic recession in its history.” (Stevis-Gridneff and Ewing, 5/6)

The New York Times: Small Businesses Counting On Loan Forgiveness Could Be Stuck With Debt
The embattled small business lending program at the center of the Trump administration’s economic rescue is running into a new set of challenges, one that threatens to saddle borrowers with huge debt loads, as banks begin the tricky task of proving the loans they extended actually met the government’s strict and shifting terms. With thousands of businesses preparing to ask for their eight-week loans to be forgiven, banks and borrowers are just now beginning to realize how complicated the program may turn out to be. Along with lawmakers, they are pushing the Treasury Department, which is overseeing the loan fund, to make forgiveness requirements easier to meet. (Rappeport and Flitter, 5/6)

The New York Times: Knock, Knock, Who’s There? No Political Canvassers, For The First Time Maybe Ever
Joseph R. Biden Jr. went door-to-door in his first Senate race in 1972, and had volunteers hand-deliver mailers. In 2018, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez walked across her district until rainwater seeped through the soles of her sneakers. This past winter, Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign mobilized an army of supporters to hit more than 800,000 doors ahead of the Iowa caucuses. But in the fall of 2020, volunteers might have to knock on a door and then sprint 10 feet away, making a pitch from a safe social distance. That is one tactic some strategists have floated as they consider a pandemic-safe update to a fundamental political tool: the humble door knock. (Goldmacher, 5/7)

The Washington Post: Democrats’ Hold On House Seat In Jeopardy As Coronavirus Complicates Vote In California
Holding the House seat in California’s congressional district north of Los Angeles County was supposed to be fairly easy for Democrats who had a growing voter advantage in the onetime GOP stronghold and a rising star of the freshman class. But that came crashing down when nude photos of then-Rep. Katie Hill were published online and her estranged husband accused her of having an affair with a member of her Capitol Hill staff. Within days of the revelations, Hill, 32, denied the affair but acknowledged the photos, apologized and resigned. (Itkowitz, 5/6)

The Associated Press: Face Masks Make A Political Statement In Era Of Coronavirus
The decision to wear a mask in public is becoming a political statement — a moment to pick sides in a brewing culture war over containing the coronavirus. While not yet as loaded as a “Make America Great Again” hat, the mask is increasingly a visual shorthand for a debate pitting those willing to follow health officials’ guidance and cover their faces against those who feel it violates their freedom or buys into a threat they think is overblown. (Weissert and Lemire, 5/7)

ProPublica: The TSA Hoarded 1.3 Million N95 Masks Even Though Airports Are Empty And It Doesn’t Need Them
The Transportation Security Administration ignored guidance from the Department of Homeland Security and internal pushback from two agency officials when it stockpiled more than 1.3 million N95 respirator masks instead of donating them to hospitals, internal records and interviews show. Internal concerns were raised in early April, when COVID-19 cases were growing by the thousands and hospitals in some parts of the country were overrun and desperate for supplies. (McSwane, 5/6)

The Washington Post: Dennis Ruhnke, Retired Kansas Farmer, Honored For Sending N95 Mask To Cuomo For Health-Care Worker
Dennis Ruhnke had a mask to spare. He had found five of them while digging through some old farm equipment — five of the coveted, medical-grade N95 respirators that nobody could seem to get their hands on, not even the federal government. Before he retired from farming, he would wear them while cleaning out the grain bins. (Hawkins, 5/6)

Reuters: WHO Guidelines For Frontline PPE Use Designed To Protect People, Conserve Gear
As the coronavirus began to spread around the world, a global shortage of masks and other protective equipment emerged, especially for frontline medical staff. How those supplies are used is crucial, experts say. Based on current evidence, SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, is most frequently transmitted between people via droplets when an infected person breathes out, coughs or sneezes, and can also spread via contaminated surfaces such as door handles. (5/7)

The Wall Street Journal: Immigrant Detainee Becomes First Covid-19 Casualty In ICE Facility
A 57-year-old man became the first person to die from Covid-19, the illness caused by the new coronavirus, in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody, according to people familiar with the matter. Carlos Ernesto Escobar Mejia was born in El Salvador but spent most of his life in the U.S. He was taken into ICE custody about four months ago, said Alex Mensing, an organizer with Pueblo Sin Fronteras, an immigrant-rights organization in Oakland, Calif. (Hackman, 5/6)

The Washington Post: ICE Detainee In California Is First In U.S. Immigration Custody To Die Of Coronavirus Disease
ICE officials did not respond to a request for comment about the fatality late Wednesday. The detainee who died Wednesday was identified by his sister as Carlos Escobedo Mejia. Mejia came to the United States decades ago with his family after war broke out in his home country of El Salvador. ICE agents arrested him in January and authorities placed in him in the Otay Mesa facility. (Hernandez, 5/6)

NPR: Nursing Home Association Asks For $10 Billion In Federal Coronavirus Relief Funds
With more than 11,000 resident deaths, nursing homes have become the epicenter of the COVID-19 crisis. Now, they're asking the federal government for help — $10 billion worth of help. The American Health Care Association, the trade organization for most nursing homes, called the impact on long-term care facilities "devastating." In a letter sent this week to the Federal Emergency Management Agency and Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, they ask for the federal government to designate relief funding from the CARES Act for nursing homes the way it has for hospitals. (Jaffe, 5/6)

The Washington Post: Sagepoint, Potomac Valley Maryland Nursing Homes Lacked Coronavirus Testing, PPE
Caitlin Evans can pinpoint the first day she and other nurses believe they exposed residents of Sagepoint Senior Living Services to the novel coronavirus. The 26-year-old nurse spent a half-hour on March 27 preparing a man with a bad cough to go to a hospital for a medical procedure. Neither she nor other nurses who helped him to the ambulance wore masks or other protective gear. Despite their pleas, they said, managers told them that such protections were unnecessary. (Tan and Chason, 5/6)

The Associated Press: Coronavirus Crisis Exacts Toll On People With Disabilities
Even before the coronavirus hit, cystic fibrosis meant a cold could put Jacob Hansen in the hospital for weeks. He relies on hand sanitizer and disinfecting wipes to stay healthy because he also has cerebral palsy and can’t easily wash his hands from his wheelchair, but these days shelves are often bare. For millions of disabled people and their families, the coronavirus crisis has piled on new difficulties and ramped up those that already existed. (Whitehurst, 5/6)

The Washington Post: Think You Had Covid-19 Already? A Lot Of People Do.
The week before Thanksgiving, Barbara O’Donnell came down with a wretched cough. “It was just really bad, and it was constant,” says O’Donnell, 62. “I would turn purple,” gasping for breath. She could barely walk up the hills near her home outside of Philadelphia. Though she is a smoker, she was healthy and strong — “I don’t get the flu, ever” — and had never experienced anything like this before. (Judkis, 5/6)