Every night for more than a month, the New York Police Department has been publishing a precisely detailed tabulation of officers' visits to a variety of private business and public spaces, on which they remind citizens that large gatherings of people are not allowed. Last night, for instance, the NYPD announced that between 8:00 a.m Tuesday and 8:00 a.m. Wednesday, officers had visited 3,116 supermarkets and pharmacies, 7,278 bars and restaurants, 1,211 public places, and 3,017 personal care facilities, with the visits resulting in zero arrests and zero fines.
This is useful information, as far as it goes; according to the NYPD's numbers, 23 arrests have been made and 188 summonses have been issued on these visits since March 17. What it isn't is a comprehensive accounting of all arrests and fines—the maximum is now $1000—related to New Yorkers violating social distancing orders since those orders were put into effect. That makes it strange that the NYPD is presenting it as such.
Earlier this week, I contacted the NYPD's public information office to ask if the department if data on social distancing fines were being published anywhere or were otherwise available. A flack quickly replied, "We have been putting out a nightly report since March 22. Please check with your desk." I asked where I could find this report. "@NYPDnews on twitter," the flack replied. I examined the account and found that it offered numbers on how many arrests were made and fines were issued specifically in connection with officers' visits to private businesses and public spaces.
Do you work for the NYPD? We'd love to hear from you. Contact the reporter at tim.marchman@vice.com.
Seeking clarification, I told the flack I sought information on the total number of fines—not all of which would necessarily be issued on these visits—and asked if I understood her correctly that any and all fines given out to anyone for violating social distancing orders would be reflected in these reports.
"Summonses =fines" came the reply. My follow-up question asking whether these nightly reports on Twitter would capture any and all instances of anyone being issued a summons by the NYPD for violating social distancing orders was not responded to.
The NYPD's position, then, seems to be that the @NYPDnews Twitter account is the authoritative source of information on how many fines the NYPD is issuing over social distancing violations. The numbers, though, clearly aren't comprehensive. In the time period covered by the NYPD report published last night, a dozen people were issued summonses at a funeral in Brooklyn, with mourners violating the ban on gatherings so blatantly that Mayor Bill de Blasio got personally involved. Whatever the actual citations, these were obviously fines given due to the social distancing order. Meanwhile, anecdotal accounts of fines and arrests abound. A VICE reporter's roommate saw people arrested on their block, seemingly in connection with violating the order, earlier this week; this wasn't reflected in the NYPD's nightly report, which cited zero arrests and summonses.
Not only are the NYPD's numbers not complete, if they were they wouldn't capture all fines the city is issuing anyway, because other authorities have the power to issue them. On April 19, the New York Daily Newsreported that according to the mayor's office, 244 fines had been issued. ("The number," the paper noted, "excludes violations issued in response to 911 calls and 311 complaints, which the NYPD declined to provide.")
The NYPD's unwillingness to provide basic information about enforcement actions is bewildering, if unsurprising; it's also, though, a boon for de Blasio. The mayor has been fulminating this week about how going forward, cops will fine and arrest, rather than warn, at large gatherings. How empty or not those threats are, and who ends up being targeted, no one will be able to say.
As many politicians push to reopen their states, a dangerous miscalculation that puts profits over people’s lives, millions of Americans remain stuck at home, sheltering in place in the hopes of stalling the coronavirus pandemic as much as humanly possible. It’s a life-saving public health measure, one that anyone who’s paying attention to the non-Fox News news right now understands will play a key role in lowering the rates of infection and death and keep hospitals from getting too overwhelmed.
That said, as important as staying home and social distancing from everyone except the people we already live with might be, such unprecedented isolation has proved maddening for many, shrinking the scope of the worlds they inhabit while amplifying what might normally be minor squabbles into full-on interpersonal warfare. Couples across the country are now coming apart at the seams over irritating habits they can no longer overlook now that they have to spend 24 hours a day with their partners. Others in relationships are discovering new, low stakes but still baffling habits that their partners partake in, ones they’d never noticed until they were forced to spend all day people-watching the love of their life.
Will a bunch of people break up over putting the toilet paper on the roll, wrong side up? How many boyfriends and girlfriends shall be torn asunder over a tying a knot to seal up the bread bag instead of using that little twisty tie thing it comes with? VICE spoke with 10 people living with their partners about the petty annoyances they’re dealing with in their relationship on top of a global pandemic.
These interviews have been edited for length and clarity. Some names have been omitted or changed for reasons of privacy. All photos are courtesy of their subjects.
Kelly, 31, New York
My husband, who is unfortunately out of work, has been using this time to learn calculus online. That’s great! I admire that he’s not lying around drinking beer and watching Seinfeld, which is what I’ve been doing. But when he’s really focused, he spins his pen in his hand then drops it on the table at irregular intervals. It is driving me up the fucking wall! A couple days ago, I told him that if he did it one more time we were headed for divorce, which was very rude, but I was completely unable to help it.
Deidre, 31, Australia
My boyfriend eats almonds by slowly nibbling on the end of one, then shoving it gently into the side of his cheek until his face is bursting with them like a cartoon squirrel. I hate it! I hate him! It’s driving me insane.
Molly, 32, Maine
The tweeting is really out of hand. My boyfriend, Nick, has always been a very stoic, cool, not online person, but now, the second we had to spend all of our time together, he got a Twitter account, and now spends 90 percent of his time tweeting and laughing into his phone. It also sucks because I’m a journalist, so I have to be on Twitter as part of my job, but he is apparently much better at tweeting. It’s infuriating!
He also makes up songs about our dog, Bukka, and sometimes the songs are really bad. You know that Rage Against the Machine song, “Killing in the Name”? He does that one but like, “buck Bukka Bukka Bukka buck Bukka Bukka Bukka…”
But the keyboard’s the big thing. You know that tweet that’s like, “every woman working from home is doing so on a MacBook Air on the couch, cup of tea. every man is at a 3-monitor setup with the loudest keyboard he could find at best buy”? That’s basically what it’s like. I’ll be on my laptop trying to think deep, important thoughts for my job, and he’s just like, CLAK CLAK CLAK CLAK CLAK. He has this, like, big, “Fuck off!” gaming computer with one of those huge keyboards like he’s a 15-year-old in his parents’ basement. It’s like he’s attempting the moon landing every time he sends an email.
He’s looking at me right now. I don’t think he’s very happy.
Nick, 31, Maine [Molly’s boyfriend, grabbing the phone]
Molly is really grumpy all the time. I’ll be like, “Hey, Molly, want me to make you a nice lunch?” And she’ll be like, “Unghh, what’s lunch?!” It’s a pain in the ass!
Kyle, 29, New York
With my boyfriend, I have the best communication I’ve ever had in a relationship by far.
But his vaping.
He’s been vaping the whole time we’ve been dating, so it’s not like it bothers me that he does it. But I didn’t notice how much he actually vapes on a day to day basis until we were on top of each other every day. I’ll walk back into the bedroom after he’s been in there working, and it’s like a fucking cigar shop in there. So smokey! I don’t want to be walking into that!
I know it’s a stressful time, so it makes me feel like I’m trying to take away his favorite stuffed animal security blanket by complaining about it. But we’re also in the middle of a pandemic that affects how you breathe. It’s probably better to stay away from something that would, you know, affect your ability to breathe? Ugh, it gives me anxiety. I worry about him.
Sean, 29, D.C.
My partner’s work voice is driving me crazy. I wouldn’t normally have to hear it very much, but now I am subjected to it constantly. It’s butcher than his normal voice and folksier and all around makes me want to put pencils in my ear. We are gay. He works for a big corporation, and I work for a lefty nonprofit, so it’s kind of unfair for me to take issue with it. I mean, code-switching works! But lord, listening to him drop his G’s and masc up his voice for these calls is excruciating.
Daniel, 29, Pennsylvania
Sometimes, it feels like I’m in some sort of Truman Show reboot where my partner was cast specifically to make me go slowly insane.
I’m trying to remember to laugh at myself whenever I notice that deranged, paranoid thinking sneaking into our otherwise healthy relationship, but it was honestly shocking to discover that my boyfriend thinks plastic bags are recyclable. Like, why are there a dozen plastic baggies stuffed around our wine bottles? What are they gonna do? Become smaller plastic baggies?! How did he go his whole life thinking this was OK?
We’ve been together for over two years, and I never noticed that before. Or that he stores knives in the drying rack pointing upwards. I know that I’m fully a monster in my own ways, but what kind of monster does that? What did I do to be so personally and blatantly attacked?
Roy, 40, California
The big one is that he works 9 to 5 as a therapist on Zoom in the guest room and when he comes out at 5 he’s in such a great and chatty mood, but I’m still out here stewing, overthinking the pandemic, and I just resent him for polluting my precious solitude. He doesn’t clean up his cat’s vomit with enough expedience, and he never uses the toilet brush. I’ve told him all this directly to his face. No space for pulling punches!
Rich, 41, New York
Sheltering in place together has just kind of magnified the roles we already play in the relationship. We have kind of like a parent-child dynamic where, at its most fraught, I take on the role of the disapproving father and he’s the rebellious teenager.
The vast majority of the time we have harmony, except for the YouTube conspiracy theory documentaries. I never realized he was into those? I mentioned it the other day, and he told me he just thinks it’s hilarious to hear people talk about aliens and chemtrails and stuff. That was a relief. If he were legitimately a pizzagate believer, I would question whether we should continue being together when quarantine is up.
He’s also really bad at brushing the cat. When he does it, he does it way too delicately. He’ll brush the cat, and, like, only a couple tiny little strands of hair will come off. I’ll be like, “Gimme the brush,” and clumps will come out. It’s just his touch. He’s too gentle with the cat. Completely ineffective! Why bother?
James, 27, New York
I’m quarantined with my partner here in New York City, and we're for sure learning a lot about each other. One quirk I’ve noticed, though low stakes, is that their chewing is incredibly bothersome to me. I totally know it’s my thing to get over, but still a quirk nonetheless. Another thing would be how they love to make themself tea or coffee and then drink a quarter of the cup. Ninety percent of the time, that’s all they drink, and then they let the cup just sit there.
Facing blowback from an accusation of sexual assault, Joe Biden’s campaign has made a rather curious selection for his vice presidential selection committee: Former Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), who has some #metoo issues of his own.
Biden’s campaign announced Thursday morning that Dodd would serve as one of four co-chairs on Biden’s vice presidential selection committee, along with Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-Del.), Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, and longtime Biden adviser Cynthia Hogan.
A Biden campaign statement announcing Dodd’s appointment described him as “a longtime friend and colleague of Vice President Biden for almost forty years” who “has earned a reputation as a leading voice on domestic and international issues during his service in the U.S. Congress.”
But that’s not Dodd's entire reputation.
Dodd was well known as Sen. Ted Kennedy’s (D-Mass.) wingman during the 1980s — The Almanac of American Politics described his “reputation as a party boy and a partner-in-nightlife-crime” of the former senator.
And that includes one rather serious allegation of sexual assault by Kennedy in which Dodd allegedly participated. The incident was initially reported in Penthouse and confirmed by GQ Magazine in a 2016 profile of Kennedy:
It is after midnight and Kennedy and Dodd are just finishing up a long dinner in a private room on the first floor of the restaurant's annex. They are drunk. Their dates, two very young blondes, leave the table to go to the bathroom. (The dates are drunk too. ‘They'd always get their girls very, very drunk," says a former Brasserie waitress.) Betty Loh, who served the foursome, also leaves the room. Raymond Campet, the co-owner of La Brasserie, tells Gaviglio the senators want to see her.
As Gaviglio enters the room, the six-foot-two, 225-plus-pound Kennedy grabs the five-foot-three, 103-pound waitress and throws her on the table. She lands on her back, scattering crystal, plates and cutlery and the lit candles. Several glasses and a crystal candlestick are broken. Kennedy then picks her up from the table and throws her on Dodd, who is sprawled in a chair. With Gaviglio on Dodd's lap, Kennedy jumps on top and begins rubbing his genital area against hers, supporting his weight on the arms of the chair. As he is doing this, Loh enters the room. She and Gaviglio both scream, drawing one or two dishwashers. Startled, Kennedy leaps up. He laughs. Bruised, shaken and angry over what she considered a sexual assault, Gaviglio runs from the room. Kennedy, Dodd and their dates leave shortly thereafter, following a friendly argument between the senators over the check.
The story continues:
According to Loh, Kennedy "was sort of leaning" on Gaviglio, "not really straddling but sort of off-balance so it was like he might have accidentally fallen…He was partially on and off…pushing himself off her to get up." Dodd, she adds, "said 'It's not my fault.' " Kennedy said something similar and added, jokingly, "Makes you wonder about the leaders of this country."
Dodd’s heavy-drinking bachelor lifestyle in the 1980s, before he remarried, is well documented. And it’s not like it would be unknown by Biden, who served with both Dodd and Kennedy for decades. A 1983 Washington Post profile described him as a man who “likes the company of women, and has spent long, raucous nights in the bars of Washington and Martha's Vineyard.
Dodd also briefly dated Carrie Fisher, who described one boozy evening with Kennedy and Dodd where a drunk Kennedy asked her “So, do you think you’ll be having sex with Chris at the end of your date?” as Dodd looked at her with “an unusual grin hanging on his very flushed face,” Fisher wrote.
Biden’s choice of Dodd is particularly striking given his own recent campaign turmoil. Biden is facing his own accusation of sexual assault from Tara Reade, a former Biden staffer, who said last month that he assaulted and digitally penetrated her in a Capitol Hill hallway. Biden’s campaign has vehemently denied her allegation, though Biden himself hasn’t publicly commented.
Biden is well aware of how important it is to dominate with female voters to defeat President Trump. He’s promised that his choice for running mate will be a woman.
Dodd has faced heat for other actions over his career as well. Dodd chaired the Senate Banking Committee and led the Senate response to banking regulation in the wake of the great recession. But he faced accusations that he’d received preferential treatment and better rates on a pair of mortgages from a “VIP Program” set up by Countrywide, which his committee regulated. Dodd was forced to refinance those mortgages after they became public.
A Senate Ethics Committee investigation found “no substantial credible evidence” that he’d violated Senate rules, but said he should have “exercised more vigilance” to avoid the appearance of preferential treatment from the mortgage lender. That scandal may have led to Dodd’s decision not run for reelection in 2010.
Neither Biden’s campaign nor Dodd responded to questions about his appointment.
“Selecting a vice presidential candidate is one of the most important decisions in a presidential campaign and no one knows this more than Joe Biden,” Biden Campaign Manager Jen O’Malley Dillon said in a statement announcing the selection. “These four co-chairs reflect the strength and diversity of our party, and will provide tremendous insight and expertise to what will be a rigorous selection and vetting process. We are grateful for their service to the campaign and for their leadership.”
Cover: Chairman and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America Chris Dodd and U.S Vice President Joe Biden speak during the 2nd Annual Creativity Conference presented by the Motion Picture Association of America at The Newseum on May 2, 2014 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Kris Connor/Getty Images)
A few days after Jeanne McMillin started working as a dispatcher for Little Dixie Transit in the small southeastern Oklahoma town of Hugo nearly 20 years ago, she got a call from someone she described as “a little lady.”
Unbeknownst to McMillin, this lady had been a long-time rider. But McMillin was having a hard time getting all her information down. There were three different phones, two-way radios blaring constantly, and lots of activity in the office of people coming and going. It was all so much more chaotic than she expected when she took the job at the rural public transit agency. So McMillin asked the lady two or three times for her origin and destination, just to make sure she got it right.
“She kind of laughed,” McMillin recalled, “and said, ‘honey, are you new?’” McMillin chuckled at the recollection and the good-natured way the woman responded to her difficulties adjusting to the new job. “She could just tell.”
Little DIxie Transit is a public transportation agency, like New York City Transit or the LA Metro. But the similarities end there. It doesn’t have billions of dollars to spend every year or a staff of tens of thousands to serve those riders. In 2018, Little Dixie Transit had a $2 million budget and a staff of about two dozen. Rather than moving millions of people a day, they move hundreds. And when someone has somewhere to go, they call the landline and talk to someone like McMillin.
McMillin says you can learn an awful lot about a person simply by knowing where they’re going, something that Google, Apple, and countless tech companies have since discovered. A person’s travel habits are intimate, revealing details. Of course, McMillin wasn’t out to profit off that information. But it meant riders became much more than riders to her.
When that “little lady” would call, she’d tell McMillin she needed to go to Walmart or get her hair done. They’d chat about what they were making for dinner, when the lady’s children were coming to visit, and when something around the house broke that needed fixing.
“It became personal because you knew this person, her life, her activities, what she liked to do,” McMillin said. “You always thought she was going to be there, because she had always been there.” And Little Dixie Transit was always there for her, too.
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The coronavirus crisis has had a powerful revealing effect on all aspects of American life. Most poignantly, it has shown us what is essential to our health and well-being. In big cities, public transportation systems that get essential workers where they need to go have received deserved recognition for their critical role in managing the crisis.
But the transit agencies across the country that serve rural populations have been less recognized. In large part, this is because many people don’t even know there’s such a thing as a rural transit agency. When most people think of public transit they think of trains and buses in dense urban areas. And when they think of rural areas, they picture people in cars driving everywhere.
But these services, which typically use smaller vans that seat a maximum of 14 people, are just as critical. They may serve fewer people, but are vital lifelines for the people who rely on them. Without these rural transit agencies, old folks would have to permanently leave their homes, the sick would routinely miss medical appointments, and some people would be stranded far from grocery stores and social events.
Motherboard spoke to four administrators of rural transit agencies and two statewide directors about the role they play in their communities for this article, and all of them stressed the underappreciated aspect of their services.
“We’re not a big urban system,” said Melissa Fesler of First Capital Trolley in Guthrie, Oklahoma. “We may not impact as many lives, but we do impact the lives of those we serve.”
In 2018, America’s 1,280 rural transit agencies made more than 125 million combined trips, according to data compiled by the American Public Transportation Association. The data doesn’t break down the purposes of those trips, but the rural transit employees Motherboard spoke to said they serve a variety of purposes. Some of their riders don’t own cars either for financial or health reasons. Others are on dialysis or receiving chemotherapy that require regular trips to health centers far from their homes and don’t have anyone else to provide that transportation. A significant portion of rural transit ridership tends to be elderly, allowing those customers to live in their homes longer than they otherwise could. Many rural agencies partner with drug courts to take people with suspended licenses to their appearances. Others bring children to school or activities while their parents are at work. Basically, if you cannot drive yourself for whatever reason, rural transit fills the gaps.
Rural transit’s proponents believe it is not merely a vital lifeline in times of crisis, but a key component to any recovery. “I always say there’s two reasons people ride the bus,” said executive director of Oklahoma Transit Association Mark Nestlen, “to make money and to spend money.” Even if that’s not strictly true, it’s a decent rule-of-thumb. For that reason, Nestlen calls transit “an economic development program that happens to have quality of life benefits.”
It’s important to not put too much stock in economic impact analyses, as they’re often little more than glorified guesswork. That being said, a host of studies have consistently found public transit in both rural and urban areas pays for itself by creating jobs, saving people money, improving health care access and outcomes, and saving lives. While the exact dollar benefits range greatly, studies consistently find rural transit is worth the money.
But these rural transit experts also said recent events have underscored how federal rules and funding formulas make it difficult to provide better or expanded service to those who need it. As a result, some are worried about what the future will bring.
“I’ve never experienced anything like what we have gone through in the last couple of months in almost 20 years of doing this work,” McMillin said, “and I’m very concerned about where we’re going to be at when we come out the other side.”
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Like their urban counterparts, many rural transit agencies didn’t shut down when their respective states issued stay-at-home orders. The managers I spoke to all recounted similar thought processes, ones reminiscent of the mutual aid networks that have sprung up around the country. They asked themselves how they can still serve their communities even if it means adhering to social distancing and putting their community first, personal finances second.
Because many of their riders use the service to get to grocery stores, several rural agencies Motherboard spoke to quickly pivoted to grocery and meal delivery. Kari Ruse, transit manager at the Nebraska Department of Transportation, said many of the rural agencies in her state are now de facto grocery delivery services, free of charge.
So too is Goose Creek Transit in Sheridan, Wyoming, which primarily serves the town’s elderly population and whose goal, according to manager Steve Ainslie, is to enable seniors to live in their homes for as long as possible. Normally, that means bringing seniors to and from the senior center, but with social distancing rules in place, Goose Creek Transit has become their go-to Walmart delivery service. Ainslie decided to waive the $2.50 fare because “it just didn’t seem like the right idea to ask” for that money.
Not only did many rural transit agencies stay open, but they are also facing expenses and various inefficiencies that are pushing their budgets. Most obviously, they had to buy personal protective equipment for their drivers—many of whom are themselves senior citizens supplementing retirement income—and gallons upon gallons of hand sanitizer and other cleaning supplies, expenses they either didn’t have before the outbreak or were much lower prior to the crisis. Fesler of First Capital Transit told Motherboard she’s been spending $80 per gallon of hand sanitizer, not to mention sanitizing all 60 vehicles between each passenger.
Image: Oklahoma Transit Association
Some rural transit agencies have it better than big city agencies that typically move millions of people, at least financially speaking. Although agencies big and small have seen ridership plummet, the CARES Act, which provided $25 billion for public transportation, will cover agency shortfalls in the 10 largest transit regions for an average of 5.4 to 8.3 months, according to an analysis by the non-profit think tank TransitCenter. For the rest of the country’s transit systems, CARES Act funding will last an average of 12.6 to 20.8 months.
This is because the CARES Act uses the same federal funding formulas as the feds do in normal times to divvy up that $25 billion, which, as Ben Fried of TransitCenter told Motherboard, “shortchange transit agencies in large cities, distributing less money relative to their share of national ridership.”
However, TransitCenter notes these are just averages, and some rural agencies are in just as dire funding straits as big city agencies due to the vagaries of these broad formulas.
In order to receive money from the feds, rural transit agencies have to scrounge up some cash on their own. For operating expenses, agencies have to match the federal contribution dollar for dollar, while administrative and capital expenses are one local dollar for every four federal ones (the CARES Act money doesn’t require a local match).
Some rural agencies get that local match from city or state tax revenues. Others raise the money on their own by providing contract services for non-emergency medical transportation, drug courts, and other local government agencies for their transportation needs.
This is a cumbersome, inexact process that works better for some rural agencies than others during normal times. Because the CARES Act uses the same basic formulas, the coronavirus crisis has therefore only exacerbated those differences, meaning those who normally struggle to put together local match funding are in even worse shape during the crisis.
First, those federal funds for rural transit agencies—which amounted to $740 million for rural transit agencies this fiscal year before the CARES Act stimulus—are appropriated based on performance metrics. The two most important metrics are how many trips the agencies provide and how many miles the vehicles travel while picking up and dropping off riders. Both of those statistics have plummeted nationwide in recent weeks.
Plus, agencies that used to transport multiple passengers at a time have changed their policies to enable social distancing. Now, they have either severely limited vehicle capacity or stopped taking multiple passengers entirely. This adds vehicle miles travelled—and the related fuel and maintenance expenses—while providing service for fewer people, making their operations appear less efficient, which hurts their federal outlay.
On top of that, those same performance measures are the ones transit administrators show to local politicians to demonstrate they’re providing a valuable service to the community. This helps justify the local match funding so they can in turn receive the federal funds. But, with tax revenues plummeting, will local or state governments continue providing that funding, especially if rural transit agency’s metrics look so bad on paper?
Even the agencies that raise their own matching funds are worried. Little Dixie Transit, for example, gets most of its matching funds through non-emergency medical transportation contracts that pay for Medicaid patients to get to their doctor’s appointments. In rural areas, those trips can take hours each way. Dialysis and chemotherapy patients are still going to their appointments because they’re medically necessary, but McMillin estimates about 75 percent of non-emergency medical trips have been cancelled. As of the end of April, she has no idea how she will make up for that lost revenue.
*
In keeping with the vagaries of federal funding formulas, some agencies are more worried about the future than others. Ruse, for example, thinks the $27 million Nebraska got through the CARES Act will help see Nebraska’s transit agencies through the difficult months ahead. Others are hoping this crisis spurs more fundamental changes in how rural transit is funded so they aren’t scrounging for dollars every year to get that federal match.
Depending on the specifics, this would likely be a great development, Nestlen believes.
“Congress never sat down at the table and said ‘let’s develop a rural transit program. What should it look like?’ They sat down at a table and said here’s the urban transit program...we’re going to have everything be the same and just put it in rural," he said. "When you do that, you’re going to put a square peg into a round hole.”
It is to their credit that the rural transit agencies do not operate like square pegs in round holes. To a person, the people interviewed for this article were proud to be serving their communities in these difficult times. Some said it reminded them why they got into this line of work to begin with. Fesler had a driver thank her for assigning her to deliver meals to seniors, because she was just grateful to be making a difference at a time where so many of us feel so isolated and powerless, the exact opposite of what a good transit system does for its passengers.
One of the people who has been reminded what she got into this line of work lately is McMillin. Seven or eight years into her tenure at Little Dixie Transit, the “little lady” who welcomed her to the new job passed away. McMillin and a half-dozen other Little Dixie Transit employees went to her funeral. After all, they spoke to her almost every day for years. They knew which days she would be calling and which days she wouldn't. It was those kinds of experiences that got McMillin hooked to the job, helping people one at a time. Never before, she said, has that been more important.
“I can’t tell you,” she added almost as an afterthought, “how many people we transport where we will be the only people they see any given day.”
As our lives have become a seemingly endless series of work meetings on Zoom and FaceTime or WhatsApp catch-ups with friends, we’re all getting a bit sick of seeing people’s faces enclosed in a cold, almost lifeless, digital frame.
A tech worker from New York had a different idea for his tech conference, which he announced, in all seriousness, on April Fools' Day. The free conference is called Deserted Island DevOps and is happening on Thursday, entirely inside Animal Crossing, the Nintendo Switch hit game released in the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic.
Speakers are doing their talks on an island in Animal Crossing specifically built for the conference, and attendees can follow along in the game, on Twitch, or Zoom, as a fallback option.
Other than the unusual, and incredibly colorful and fun setting, the conference is very much like any other conference. The speakers’ avatars are standing behind a podium, their slides are being displayed next to them, and attendees sit in the audience. Crucially, the conference isn't about Animal Crossing, it's kind of a standard software development type conference. It just happens to be happening inside a video game.
The organizer, Austin Parker, said earlier this week that more than 1,000 people registered to virtually attend it.
Judging from the enthusiasm both speakers and attendees are showing, it seems like the idea was a success.
Ultimately, this is just another tech conference, but hosting it on Animal Crossing, as opposed to having people speak in front of their webcams in their home offices is a genius idea.
Fueled by a combination of economic anxiety, anti-government sentiment and conspiracy theories, the anti-lockdown movement has ballooned in the U.S., almost as quickly as the coronavirus itself.
In the last three weeks alone, there have been more than 90 protests in 46 states. Some of these events have drawn dozens to their state capitals, others hundreds, and even thousands, defying warnings from public health officials. In some cases, these have generated ugly scenes of protesters harassing healthcare workers or waving Confederate flags.
But what was initially viewed as ultra-fringe has proven to have staying power despite contradicting all public health guidance on stemming the spread of the virus — and a rag-tag group of Facebook who came together this month under the umbrella of “American Revolution 2.0” think they can keep it that way by rehabilitating the movement’s image. On Friday, they’re hoping to turn out big numbers in a coordinated protest in all 50 states — in theory, a critical mass that would take the small local protests to the next level.
The so-called “March for Freedom” is trying to appeal to a more mainstream audience by framing measures to contain the coronavirus pandemic — which has killed more than 60,000 people in the U.S. and sickened over a million — as fundamentally anti-American.
“For me, I really see this as a unification event,” said Josh Ellis, who owns a business repairing water damage and mold in Naperville, Illinois. “This is the time to bring all different beliefs, cultures together, under the American flag, and just support our country.”
Ellis is running PR for the group. His job is to try and put a clean face on a protest movement that’s been dominated by extremist messaging and bizarre conspiracy theories. American Revolution 2.0 organizers are even asking attendees to forgo their MAGA hats and Trump flags — which have been mainstays of the protests so far — to give the appearance of nonpartisanship.
“The precedent must be set by ‘We The People’ that these draconian, tyrannical actions will never be accepted again,” they wrote in a press release.
But Ellis may have a serious uphill challenge if he wants to broaden the movement’s appeal by Friday.
For starters, the lockdown issue is an intensely polarized one. Recent polling by Axios/ Ipsos found that only 49% of Republicans are very concerned about coronavirus, down from 56% last week. That’s compared to 80% of Democrats. And the lockdowns are broadly viewed as a necessary evil: the vast majority of Americans believe that social distancing should continue to avoid a possible second wave of infections: a POLITICO/Morning Consult poll released Wednesday found that 73% of American voters believe social distancing should continue, even if it causes additional harm to the economy.
What’s more: even if the majority of people coming out to anti-lockdown protests are Americans who are desperate to return to work, they’ve been lumped in with the loud conspiracy theorists whose rhetoric and ideas have given the movement a more sinister shape and tone. Some protesters have carried signs promoting bizarre conspiracies, like 5G causing coronavirus — or shown up heavily armed.
(Facebook told VICE News that this violated their recidivism policy and that they’d removed the main AR2 page. “We don’t allow people to create new groups to replace those we’ve removed for violating our community standards,” a spokesperson wrote in an email.)
But the state-specific AR2 groups remain at time of publication. Under the AR2 banner, Ellis is helping to coordinate 52 protests expected to take place on May 1 (one in each state, plus two in California and two in Illinois); each protest has its own corresponding AR2 Facebook group. Membership in those groups range from about a dozen or so in places like Vermont, to thousands in Los Angeles. Their numbers in some places will be bolstered by a separate drive-in “MAGA May Day” rally organized by “Women for Trump.”
Ellis is not himself a “coronavirus truther” (a term that’s increasingly used to describe people who think that the whole thing is a hoax) — he believes the virus is real. He just thinks that the lockdown orders are offensive – ”Americans aren’t stupid” he said — and that the government has no business getting involved in people’s health.
“We’re not deniers of the coronavirus,” he said in a recent YouTube video. “We simply are people who want to protect our constitutional rights and believe it’s our responsibility to take care of our health and our neighbors — not the government.” (So far, the courts don’t seem to agree that lockdowns are unconstitutional: a judge in Michigan ruled on Wednesday that while the measures might cause temporary harm to the economy, that harm does not outweigh the public health risks posed by coronavirus).
Despite Ellis’ reasonable position that coronavirus is real, on Tuesday he appeared on Infowars, which has peddled all sorts of bizarre conspiracy theories about the virus (the latest being that it’s a ploy to facilitate robots taking over the economy). Infowars’ host Alex Jones has been present at several anti-lockdown protests in Austin, Texas — even joining protesters in a chant of “arrest Bill Gates.”
In another effort to appear like they’ve taken public health into consideration, anyone who wants to join the AR2 Facebook pages has to commit to wearing a mask and exercising social distancing at Friday’s protests. Asked how he could reconcile his hope for a huge turnout with social distancing, Ellis pointed to a recent protest in Tel Aviv, Israel as the gold standard. Last weekend, thousands of Israelis protesting the new coalition government maintained a six-feet distance from one another. “We’re gonna take up a lot of room,” Ellis said.
Some of the protests in the last few weeks have been “drive-in” rallies, where protesters have waved signs from their cars or driven caravan-style around government buildings. But there have been plenty of examples of protests where demonstrators turned out in their hundreds, even thousands, without masks, and stood in close proximity to one-another. Epidemiologists have warned that the rallies could lead to a spike in COVID-19 cases.
Some of the coordinated protests so far have also been accused of astroturfing. They’ve given the appearance of a grassroots movement when really they had some significant financial backing from conservative interest groups, like one linked to the family of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, or to a group of brothers known for their activism around gun rights.
But as far as “American Revolution 2.0” is concerned, Ellis insists that they’re just “a bunch of social media friends” who connected online. And though AR2 doesn’t appear to have the financial backing that some of the earlier protests have, Ellis says that the May 1 events have started to attract some local organizers. For example, retired WWE star Gabe Tufts (aka “Tyler Reks”) in Texas is helping to coordinate the Austin rally. A group called “My Militia,” which describes itself as the “#1 patriot networking community online” will help out in Utah. The Libertarian Party of Florida put out a press release saying they were joining forces with AR2 in Tallahassee on May 1.
There’s some evidence that the mounting pressure of these protests, together with infection rates appearing to plateau in some hot zones, could be influencing some governors’ decisions to begin the process of reopening their states. Retail stores, bars and restaurants will open in Texas on Friday with limited capacity. Georgia has also reopened restaurants, bars, barbers, hair salons and gyms, as well as other businesses, with limited capacity. And the protesters seem to have a friend in Trump, who was accused of stoking the movement through a string of tweets calling to “liberate” Minnesota, Virginia and Michigan, in an apparent reference to the protests that had taken place there.
Cover:People attend a demonstration against the government mandated lockdown due to concern about COVID-19 at the State House, Saturday, April 18, 2020, in Concord, N.H. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer)
Just a few weeks ago, scientists from the European Space Agency (ESA) discovered the largest hole in the ozone layer ever in the Arctic—a hole that covered an area roughly three times the area of Greenland. But scientists at the Copernicus' Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS), who were monitoring the progress of the hole, have now declared that this hole has closed up—just as suddenly as it had appeared.
While this may seem like good news for the environment—people have been freaking out over the ozone hole since before Smashmouth immortalized it in the lyrics for “All Star”—this disappearance is likely not due to the decrease in pollution around the world as we all stay indoors. “This Arctic ozone hole actually has nothing to do with coronavirus-related lockdowns,” CAMS explained repeatedly in the commentsto the tweet. “It's been driven by an unusually strong and long-lived polar vortex, and isn't related to air quality changes.” Even in their statement a few weeks ago, the ESA had said they expected it to heal back by mid-April 2020.
The ozone layer is a layer of gas in the stratosphere that absorbs most of the sun’s harmful ultraviolet radiation—rays that are associated with skin cancer, cataracts, and a host of environmental issues. The infamous ozone holes occur because of the thinning of this layer of air—driven by extremely cold temperatures, sunlight, and substances such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which are common in products such as aerosol sprays, pesticides, and flame retardants. But the massive hole in question was bizarre in ways more than one. “While we are used to ozone holes developing over the Antarctic every year due to seasonal changes, the conditions needed for such strong ozone depletion are not normally found in the Northern Hemisphere,” said CAMS in their statement.
The holes in the Antarctic are mainly caused due to the migration of human-made chemicals such as CFCs into the stratosphere. These chemicals accumulate inside the polar vortex—a large area of cold air in the stratosphere over the poles—that develops over the Antarctic every winter. The polar vortex over the Arctic, however, is usually weaker than the Southern Hemisphere, so it is unusual for the Arctic to have ozone holes this huge.
According to recent data from NASA, ozone levels above the Arctic reached this record low after almost ten years—2011 was the last when this had happened. In fact, in October, the hole over Antarctica made news for shrinking to the smallest size ever on record. And though the hole that closed up might not have been because of long-term healing, CAMS believes there’s still hope. It tweeted: The ozone layer is also healing, but slowly.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation is making a new camera board that will let users build their own cameras to take high quality photos. It’s called High Quality Camera and it comes with a 12.3 megapixel Sony IMX477 sensor, and supports C and CS mount lenses. Oh, and it only costs $50.
The High Quality Camera will improve image quality over the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s previous camera board, which relied on smaller resolution sensors and used fixed focus-lenses. The C and CS mounts will let the High Quality Camera use a wide range of existing lenses, including Cannon’s various lenses, giving the user a lot of control over the image quality. Price conscious enthusiasts can get started with a Raspberry Pi branded $25 6mm CS-mount lens or a $50 16mm C-mount lens.
Raspberry Pi’s camera boards are about the size of a credit card and can turn into a wide variety of machines. You can turn them into a digital camera for personal use and load them down with fancy lenses, sure, but users have also turned them into doorbell cameras, underwater wildlife monitors, in-home security cameras, and stop motion animation machines.
Along with the High Quality Camera, Raspberry Pi Foundation has released a PDF with instructions on how to use its board to build many of these devices. It’s free if you download it, and $12.50 if you want a print copy.
In 1970, three years before the Supreme Court handed down its landmark Roe v. Wade decision, Hawaii became the first state to legalize abortion. Today, its abortion laws remain among the country’s most liberal, although patients still face access barriers—chiefly because of the state’s geography. Maui, Oahu, and the main island all have abortion providers, often obligating residents of the five other islands to buy a plane ticket in order to terminate legally. To help Hawaiians route around that added expense, providers in the state have been—successfully—testing medication abortion via telemedicine for eligible, farther-flung patients.
That Hawaii permits “TelAbortion” is itself a rarity, as is the state law enacted in 2006 that affirms Roe v. Wade by barring the state from “deny[ing] or interfer[ing] with a female’s right to choose or obtain an abortion of a nonviable fetus or an abortion that is necessary to protect the life or health of the female.”
Only licensed physicians or osteopathic surgeons can perform procedural abortions; although medication abortions can be administered by advanced practice clinicians like registered nurse practitioners
Abortions are only legal at or after viability (~24 weeks) when the patient’s life or health is endangered.
How old do you have to be to get an abortion in Hawaii?
Hawaii does not place any age restrictions on abortion access.
How much does it cost to get an abortion in Hawaii?
Cost depends on how far along the pregnancy is and whether or not you have insurance that will cover it. Hawaii does not place any abortion-coverage restrictions on marketplace or private insurance plans, and Medicaid covers abortion care. You can ask on the phone before scheduling an appointment what the cost might look like. The National Network of Abortion Funds may be able to help with the cost.
Where can you get an abortion in Hawaii?
If you search for abortion clinics in Hawaii you’ll find three (two on Oahu and one on Maui), but there are technically more providers—as of a 2017 report, there were 28 facilities providing abortion in the state. That’s likely because there are other providers who offer abortion services to their patients, but do not accept referrals.
What is it like seeking an abortion in Hawaii?
This is one patient’s story.
Candace, who didn't want to use her real name, found out she was pregnant in October 2019, after a missed period and a series of unusually vivid dreams signaled to her that things were off. “Something was just subtly telling me to check everything, and [pregnancy] was the first thing that came to mind,” she told VICE. She took a pregnancy test, “and sure enough, it was positive.”
Once Candace, then 25, decided to get an abortion, she consulted her midwife, and found out about a telemedicine abortion pilot program run by the research group Gynuity Health in which Hawaii participates. After a patient confirms their pregnancy via an ultrasound or a blood test, they can meet with a provider via video chat: the doctor walks them through detailed instructions on how medication abortion works. If the patient is fewer than 10 weeks along, the provider can then ship them FDA-approved abortion pills for use at home. (Ordinarily, FDA regulations bar these drugs from being shipped but Gynuity has permission to do so as part of a clinical trial, which operates in 13 states. A Hawaii physician is suing the FDA over the rules.) So far, the program has proved “safe, effective, efficient, and satisfactory,” per a 2019 review.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
When did you decide to get an abortion?
I was definitely not certain in my decision for some time, and even the midwife I was seeing noted to me that in her twenty-some years of practice, she’s never met anyone who took more time and energy and thoroughly considered all of the options, really weighing out what the decision was going to be. Instinctively, I had feelings of happiness and excitement because of the possibility, it was something I’d always looked forward to in my life, wanting to be a mother. And then when the reality actually struck me, I was looking at my relationship, my stability not only financially, but also where I was at with the growth of myself as an individual. I wasn’t exactly where I’d like to be in terms of guiding another person through life. It was a really emotional time, figuring that out, and even after I decided to move forward, there’s still feelings of uncertainty. You never know what could’ve been, and your mind will still linger there sometimes, but it’s definitely a very emotional thing that I did not take lightly.
What steps did you take to get an abortion via telehealth?
I felt like I had a lot of flexibility, because without that option, I would’ve had to go to [the neighboring island] to see the doctor, and there are other expenses involved in doing that. It’s about a 40-minute plane ride; at that time, prices were about $100 round trip, and then accommodations on the other island, renting a car—those were the main expenses.
Whereas with telehealth, I was able to do everything on the island where I’m located: going to get an ultrasound to confirm the pregnancy, and having the medicine mailed to my house and doing everything else from the comfort of my home, which was actually a very good experience in comparison to what I know the other options are.
My midwife has a close relationship with the doctor who does the ultrasounds here, so she contacted him and said it was a time-sensitive situation and that I needed an ultrasound as soon as possible. I believe it was the next day I got to go and get my ultrasound done.
Did you have a counseling appointment?
You definitely have to have the telehealth appointment before they’ll make any move in terms of sending you the pills. I had to do a video chat with [the doctor]. We were both in the comfort of our homes, and she asked me questions. I think she really wanted to ensure that I was confident with my decision, that there was rationale behind the choice that I was making, pretty much just hearing my story.
Can you tell me a little bit about the experience itself and what it was like going through all of it at home?
You take a pill and then 24 hours later, you take a second pill. I know a lot of people do get symptoms and side effects from [the first one]; I personally did not. It was more of a waiting game, and once I took the second one, within a few hours I had a lot of heavy cramping, extreme bleeding, which I would describe as a very heavy period. There is some pain involved, just with the cramping.
Thankfully, I had a good girlfriend who supported me all the way through my process. Being in the comfort of my home, it was perfect. I got to plan for it, I had everything I needed, I had a heating pad, I had food, and my friend there to comfort me. If I needed anything, I knew she was there in the other room, but I was in the bathroom for a lot of the night, letting it all pass. The next day, or days after, there was definitely a lot of continual bleeding but you could tell that the heaviness the night that I took it had passed the pregnancy.
[For follow-up] you have two options to confirm that the termination was successful: you can do either a blood test or an ultrasound, and I opted to do the ultrasound. My doctor did note that there was a very small something left behind [in the uterus] but it wasn’t anything of concern, it was something he assumed would later pass. [The abortion] was deemed a success.
Do you remember how much the procedure cost? If you had insurance at the time, did insurance cover any of it?
I had insurance at the time, and I don’t believe I paid anything out of pocket for the entire thing.
Anything else you’d like to say about the experience?
Telehealth is a great option. I’m very grateful that this is the route that I was able to take. It gives people more independence and a sense of control over the situation. You’re already giving up so much, in a sense, and if you at least have the ability to do this on your own—some people maybe want to be guided by a doctor, but for me, it was almost more empowering to know, Okay, I'm doing this on my time. It gave me more freedom, the whole experience. Freedom and the ability to really dictate how it was going to go.
On the same day Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp announced this month that he had decided to reopen the state, a local hair stylist named Rachel received a text from her boss.
Before the pandemic hit her home state, Rachel had been working at two salons, and one of them wanted her to know that they would be opening in a matter of days. The news made Rachel nervous. Kemp had decided to open the state against the warnings of infectious disease experts. And now, her boss was only giving her a day to decide what she wanted to do.
Rachel, who declined to provide her last name to VICE, tried to discuss with her boss ways that they could come into work safely, but felt that she wasn’t open to her concerns, even when it came to something as simple as moving from being a cash business to an electronic one. “She was like, ‘We’ll do things as we always have’,” Rachel said.
When Rachel asked to come back to work at a later date, her boss let her go instead. Now, she’s worried that she might lose her unemployment benefits as well. States have made it clear that if people refuse suitable employment, they will likely lose their unemployment benefits.
But Rachel said she was more concerned about the safety of the elderly family members and toddler that she lives with. “Something could go wrong and then you bring [the virus] home to your family and your family is all sick and it’s your fault,” Rachel said.
Even as public health officials warn that it’s still too soon to reopen businesses, the message from Republican governors across the country is clear—slashing their budgets and dubious attempts to reshore the economy amidst a pandemic is more of a concern than their constituents’ lives and safety. “We cannot continue this way economically,” Kemp declared on Monday after opening up his state’s restaurants, tattoo parlors, gyms, and salons. “The price has been steep,” Texas Governor Greg Abbott said when he announced he was planning to begin reopening the state’s business. Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt emphasized that he had to “mitigate the loss to our economy and get our workers back working as quickly as possible.”
The governors’ decision means that people in these states are now facing a choice that is not a choice at all: Either risk their health to come back to work at businesses that might not even have customers, or lose their jobs and get pushed off of their unemployment benefits.
“Something could go wrong and then you bring [the virus] home to your family and your family is all sick and it’s your fault,” Rachel said.
“Do I just go to work to keep my job knowing I won’t make any money and won’t get unemployment?” Saneka Smith, a server whose restaurant is reopening in Georgia next week, told VICE. “Or do I not go back to work for my safety and then I don’t have any type of income?”
Smith says she can’t imagine being able to stay six feet away from her co-workers and restaurant patrons. She hasn’t decided yet what she’ll do, but feels pressured to return given that she’s depending completely on her unemployment benefits right now.
Saneka Smith (left) Candace Hughes (middle) Courtney Hunt (right) live in states that are reopening. They all think it's too soon to go back to work. (Photos courtesy of Smith, Hughes, and Hunt)
Much of the coverage around reopening has focused on restarting the economy and protestors pressuring governors for “freedom” from lockdown measures. But Michele Evermore, senior policy analyst at the National Employment Law Project, said that’s not the only reason lawmakers are keen to send people back to work. “A lot of this is about reducing unemployment insurance rolls,” Evermore said. Oklahoma workforce leaders even considered asking the federal government to end the extra $600 in unemployment insurance early, given that it might have a “disincentive effect.”
“The question is, is any job, like a restaurant job, suitable right now?” Evermore said. “The working conditions there are much [worse] than when the person lost the job. It’s now very unsafe.”
Over the past few months, more than 50,000 people in the U.S. have died from coronavirus. The nation’s top infectious disease expert, Anthony Fauci, advised that the country should double the amount of testing before businesses begin reopening, stating that there was “no doubt” the U.S. would see new coronavirus cases as states reopen. Despite recent protests in states like Michigan, a large majority of the American public supports sheltering in place. One recent poll showed 80 percent of people agreeing that such measures are necessary to restrict the virus.
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States have instructed businesses that are opening up to reduce capacity and implement social distancing guidelines. But many workers told VICE that they feel like their workplaces—salons, restaurants, tattoo parlors—won’t be able to adhere to them.
Candace Hughes, a hair stylist in Dallas, told VICE that she thinks that it’s still too soon to return to work. In Texas, hair salons are part of phase two of the governor’s reopening plan, which could commence as soon as May 18.
“The question is, is any job, like a restaurant job, suitable right now?” Evermore said. “The working conditions there are much [worse] than when the person lost the job. It’s now very unsafe.”
“There is no way that we can work within six feet of our clients and still practice social distancing. A lot of the times we’re breathing on each other,” Hughes said. She’s getting pandemic unemployment insurance right now, but is scared that she’ll lose it if she turns down work when her salon reopens. Hughes has to support her daughter, but she’s also concerned about exposing herself by going back to work because her daughter has asthma.
Courtney Hunt works as a receptionist for a veterinarian office in Oklahoma. Because Hunt sat in close proximity with her coworker and not everyone at her office was wearing masks, she felt she had no choice but to stop working soon after the pandemic began. “I basically stood up and said, I am not comfortable with this,” Hunt told VICE.
Hunt, who is the 43-year-old mother of a son with asthma, said she would revisit the situation when the stay-at-home order was lifted, and was allowed to go on unemployment. But now, with Oklahoma already reopening businesses, those benefits are at risk and she feels trapped.
“It’s a hard position to be in,” Hunt said.“If [my boss] offers me my job back and says Come back on May 1st, I don’t feel like I can look at her and say ‘I don’t want to come back, I’m scared.’”
In many of these states, such decisions are falling to low-wage, minority workers. Bloomberg’s CityLab pointed out that 19 percent of black workers in Georgia are employed in the service industry, a sector that has been hit especially hard by the pandemic. Black and Hispanic workers are less likely to have jobs where they can work from home and black people are dying at disproportionate rates from coronavirus.
Republican governors’ decision to re-open their states and push people off of unemployment is part of a long history of states denying minority, low-income workers benefits. Many of the states that are reopening early are already among the worst when it comes to unemployment insurance recipiency rates.
In the wake of the last recession, which also saw expanded unemployment benefits, an Urban Institute study found that black workers had a disproportionately high unemployment rate of 11 percent, compared to 7 percent of white workers in 2010. But they also had the lowest unemployment insurance recipiency rate, with less than 24 percent of unemployed black workers receiving benefits, compared to 33 percent of white workers.
“It’s a hard position to be in,” Hunt said.“If [my boss] offers me my job back and says Come back on May 1st, I don’t feel like I can look at her and say ‘I don’t want to come back, I’m scared.’”
“When you look at states that have gutted their unemployment insurance system and really reduced benefits, they’re states with a high number of workers of color,” Evermore said. “Communities of color are going to suffer for a very long time from this.”
Governors like Kemp have framed their states’ reopenings as an “opportunity,” not a “mandate.” But many workers VICE spoke to feel like they’re being strong-armed into going back to work. With backed-up unemployment lines and delayed stimulus checks, some people have to return to their jobs before they think it’s safe simply because they need money to survive.
“We’re put to the question of either starve to death and lose our homes, or go make money and put ourselves in a risky situation,” Jason Goodnight, a 33-year-old tattoo artist in Georgia, told VICE. Goodnight applied for pandemic unemployment insurance as an independent contractor, but hasn’t received anything yet. He’s planning to return to his tattoo parlor this week, even though he thinks it’s too soon.
Restaurant server Blythe Nichols (left) and tattoo artist Jason Goodnight (right). (Photos courtesy of Nichols and Goodnight)
An analysis from the Economic Policy Institute found that for every ten people who successfully applied for unemployment in the last month, three to four tried but couldn’t get through and two did not even try because it was too difficult to do so. Almost two months after the pandemic began, some have yet to see any relief from the government. That gives workers who might want to stay safe less financial wiggle room to do so.
“Even if we wanted to play it safe and stay at home because that’s the right thing to do right now, we’re going to lose that home and end up sleeping under a bridge,” Goodnight said. He noted that it’s been difficult for tattoo artists to find the protective gear they need as they resume working.
If workers do risk returning to their jobs, they also have to contend with the fact that they probably won’t be making as much money as they did before the pandemic started. Smith, the restaurant server, is weighing the fact that even if she goes in, she won’t make as much if demand is slow. “I don’t feel a lot of people are going to be wanting to eat out,” she said.
“We’re put to the question of either starve to death and lose our homes, or go make money and put ourselves in a risky situation,” Jason Goodnight, a 33-year-old tattoo artist in Georgia, told VICE.
“A lot of clients I’ve gotten in touch with about coming back relatively soon are a bit hesitant,” Goodnight said. But with his savings drained and rent due, he needs any money he can get. When asked about what he thought about Kent reopening the state, Goodnight said, “It comes off as a ploy to avoid paying us.”
It’s not that employees don’t understand the challenges some of their employers are facing. Blythe Nichols, 41, was able to receive unemployment after she lost her job waiting tables at a small restaurant outside of Atlanta, Georgia. Her boss, however, didn’t receive substantial government aid in any form and is now stressed about the financial health of the business.
“He feels a real pressure being a small business to open up right away,” Nichols said. “So he’s kind of said that we have to suck it up and go back.”
Nichols feels a loyalty to her employer, but she’s scared to go back. She has a 74-year-old mother, and she questions the judgement of any patron who would enter the restaurant, let alone the decision by her governor to open the state of Georgia back up already.
“I feel like we’re all just this test market on this. Like we’re just being thrown to the wolves,” she said.
But when VICE asked her if she would ultimately return to her job, Nichols didn’t have to think too hard about her answer. After all, she said, “I don’t think we have a choice.”
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Yemen has reported its first deaths from coronavirus, fueling fears of a devastating outbreak in a country already enduring the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
Yemen’s Health Minister, Nasser Baoum, revealed late Wednesday that the country had recorded five new cases, two of which — reportedly a pair of brothers — had proven fatal. All the new cases were the southern port of Aden.
Previously the country had only confirmed a single case, in Hadramawt governorate in the east of the country.
“We have all been waiting for this moment and preparing for it despite our scarce [health] capabilities,” Abdul Nasser al-Wali, an official in the separatist Southern Transitional Council told Reuters. “It is very likely the numbers will increase in coming days.”
Aid groups fear that there is much more widespread transmission of the virus than the scant testing shows so far, adding to concerns of a catastrophic outbreak in a war-torn country that’s considered one of the world’s most vulnerable environments for coronavirus.
Tamuna Sabadze, Yemen country director at the International Rescue Committee, told VICE News that her organization was “extremely concerned” by the new cases.
“These are the first new confirmed cases since the first case was discovered almost two weeks ago, and shows the disease is now spreading amongst the community.”
The war-ravaged country has extremely limited capacity to test in order to track the spread of the virus, or to adequately treat those who catch it: as of last week, only about 170 tests had been carried out among a population of 30 million.
Already, the handful of detected cases are proving too much for the country’s ill-equipped health care facilities. The hospital treating most of the patients reportedly closed its doors Wednesday, saying it couldn’t receive any more patients due to a lack of protective equipment.
“Yemen has all the ingredients for coronavirus to cause serious devastation to an already fragile country, which doesn’t have the health care capacity to deal with a widespread outbreak,” said Sabadze. “It is not only the lack of testing capacity… but also the fact that over half of the country’s health facilities are no longer functioning and that 18 million Yemenis do not have access to proper hygiene, water, and sanitation.”
Yemen has been ravaged by war since Shiite rebels known as Houthis ousted the government from power in the capital Sanaa, prompting a Saudi-led military coalition to intervene in March 2015.
Years of fighting have left the country mired in a humanitarian crisis and virtually defenseless against coronavirus if an outbreak were to take hold. Already, 80% of the population is dependent on aid, with 10 million people facing famine and more than 3 million displaced and living in overcrowded settlements where social distancing and proper hygiene are impossible.
On Tuesday, the U.N.’s humanitarian coordinator for Yemen, Lise Grande, warned that there was “a very real probability that the virus has been circulating undetected and unmitigated,” while the U.N. Refugee Agency refugee warned that coronavirus, along with severe recent flooding that had impacted more than 100,000 people, threatened to compound the existing humanitarian crisis.
"The country is now also facing the overlapping threat of the coronavirus pandemic, and the impact of recent torrential rain and flooding,” spokeswoman Shabia Mantoo told reporters.
Earlier this month, the Saudi-led coalition announced a unilateral ceasefire in response to the announcement of the first detected coronavirus case. But “fighting has continued in many areas across the country,” Samah Hadid, Oxfam’s director of advocacy for Yemen told VICE News.
According to the Yemen Data Project, last week fighting between the Saudi-led coalition and the Houthis ramped up by a third compared to the previous week, including a number of airstrikes on civilian sites. Sabadze said the violence is hampering aid groups’ efforts to put coronavirus mitigation systems in place and deliver crucial humanitarian aid, and called on Western governments to push the warring parties to agree to a binding nationwide ceasefire.
“There is still time to intervene and launch a comprehensive response to ease the suffering of the Yemeni people,” she said. “But their suffering will not end until the war ends.”
Cover: Yemeni men read verses of Quran, Islam's holy book, on the first day of the holy fasting month of Ramadan, at the grand Mosque in the old city of Sanaa. 24 April 2020. (Hani Al-Ansi/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images)
The live music ecosystem has been devastated by coronavirus, and every corner of the music industry has felt devastating effects of the pandemic. Concerts could be off until 2021, album release dates have been postponed or canceled, and the future of recording studios is one big unknown. Even before the pandemic, studios had been facing challenges due to the rise in popularity, quality, and convenience of home recording, as well as gentrification and increasing rents, have made it harder to stay open. But with shelter-in-place orders and social distancing measures enacted across the country, studios have had to clear their schedule and turn new clients away.
"It's not just that the calendar is emptied in the studio, but all of the records we were working on the label side are made in our studio. All the records we were making and the stuff we were supposed to be working on is affected by the studio being empty," said Trey Pollard, the co-owner of Richmond, Virginia's Spacebomb, a recording studio, record label, and production company. "Economically, actual recording studios that live and die by the calendar being full, I have no idea how they're coping. Spacebomb doesn't operate that way since our studio is for our label and our individual producers to use."
Though Spacebomb can focus more on business with their record label and can finish mixing albums that are already in progress remotely, smaller studios like Minneapolis musician Holly Hansen's Salon, which depends on new clients, are facing insurmountable challenges.
"I'm at the point where I don't know if I should start thinking about closing. I have a month-to-month lease and I'm essentially paying most of the rent out of my pocket right now," Hansen said. "It's unfortunate because this is the only female-owned studio in Minneapolis that was open for clients. I was really excited about that because it's never happened. I want to keep it open but I don't know if I can."
Engineers have turned to mixing projects they can tackle independently and backlogs of work they need to finish. "Everyone is getting hit but not everyone has just gone to zero. I happen to just have a good amount of remote work that I can do with mixing and mastering things," said Jack Shirley, a Bay Area-based engineer and owner of The Atomic Garden.
But it's not all doom and gloom. Because much of their work can be done remotely, some sound engineers are doing okay. "People will be recording stuff at home and then you can send it to a great engineer and a studio and they can take it over the finish line," Pollard said. "That's something that's happening a lot. I don't think mixing and mastering engineers are losing a lot of work."
But many studios cannot subsist on the revenue from mixing and mastering alone. Michael Kolar, the owner of Chicago's SoundScape Studios says he's been able to do some work from afar, but it's not a sustainable financial situation.
"Luckily what's been coming in has been enough to pay all of our bills: utilities, gear insurance, alarm monitoring, et cetera," he said. "But there is nothing left to pay myself." While Shirley was able to secure help from the Small Business Association for the Atomic Garden, other studios have had worse luck. "I've looked high and low. I've spent days on my laptop applying to everything. I have not gotten 1 cent from any city, state or federal, loan assistance, payroll protection," Kolar said.
Studios like SoundScape, which has been in business for 23 years, have emergency savings and the Atomic Garden, which keeps overhead low because Shirley lives in the building that houses the studio, have means to power through the pandemic. SoundScape had to furlough its staff to stay afloat.
"All my staff who work here are sitting at home. Only one or two were on payroll to get unemployment while the rest were independent contractors so there's not much for them," Kolar said. "It's the same for my clients. So many artists who come to this studio were of the gig economy to have flexible work to pursue their musical dreams. They were bartenders and waitresses and worked in music venues and drove Uber and now they're all fucked."
For now, all studios are stuck in a waiting game for when restrictions are lifted and they are safe to take on clients again. But as lockdowns end and people return to work, recording studios will still face uncertainty.
"I don't see a rosy future here. Are artists going to want to step up and put their mouth six inches away from a microphone that so many people breathe on? Are you trying to go into a soundproofed, sealed off room that has no windows with other people?" says Kolar. Hansen is also concerned: "I would feel comfortable starting sessions again if I knew that people could get tests and not only to see if they have it, but also if they have the antibody. Only then it makes sense to do what we can to replicate normal life and normal studio work while still taking precautions."
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Ischgl in Austria’s Tyrol region is known as the “Ibiza of the Alps.” What was happening in the bars there was pretty much the opposite of social distancing.
“These guys know how to do it,” said Scott Phimister, who spent a happy few days in March snowboarding and partying in crowded, sweaty mountain bars.
“These bars some of them are crazy, it's all Euro-pop and all that stuff. And the Austrians and the Germans, they just go bananas."
On March 7, the day Scott and his friends arrived in Ischgl, a barman in one of the town’s most raucous bars tested positive for COVID-19. The bar was disinfected, and the barman was quarantined, but nothing much else happened. The Tyrol government just claimed that, “from a medical point of view, transmission of the coronavirus to guests in the bar is rather unlikely.”
The barman was the first person to test positive for COVID-19 in Ischgl, but authorities had, in fact, known for several days that tourists were returning from the area infected with COVID-19, after receiving a warning from Iceland.
And tourists who were still in Tyrol , like Scott, were not alerted to the situation.
Cover: Tourists skiing on the mountain in Ischgl during early March 2020. (Credit: Scott Phimister/VICE News.)
