Follow section front redirects in Spectrum

Enable NLP source in PCS for load testing

Switch off the News Alerts Survey Widget when we have enough responses

Poll to determine if new LUF updates are available

Allows the winning A/B test variant to be turned on without Spectrum deployment

Show infinite scrolling sections in Assembler MultiView

Show option for NLP article summaries in Action Bar

A general feature flag for Recipe Features that aren't yet released

Feature flag for media team features that aren't yet released

Use new Orca video player for preroll plugin in Spectrum

Show the snow tracker (instead of the heat tracker) on Spectrum

How to confront antisemitism, deal with protests — and respect free speech

Is student loan debt an emergency? Take our quiz.

Humans might need to re-engineer the climate

Brave Little Hunter is free: Baby orca escapes lagoon for open seas

Soldiers reunite with their pets from overseas: ‘It meant everything to me’

Chiropractor works on giraffe, is nuzzled: ‘Giraffes are just giant dogs?’

Americans are sleeping more than ever. See how you compare.

Where seas are rising at alarming speed 

The new face of flooding

Nationals sweep away the Marlins to get back to .500

The Rangers swept the Capitals, and it’s time for the new core to take charge

Jayden Daniels is latest in Washington’s checkered history of first-round QBs

Ask Amy: Why did my friend lie about seeing my ex-girlfriend?

Carolyn Hax: Her family left all the kitchen work to her, so she went on strike

Miss Manners: Some audience members ask rambling questions post-lecture

A new measure of ‘Trump amnesia’ in swing states

Harsh deportation tools are just fine with many Americans

How the Biden impeachment push echoes Trump’s effort to retain power

In a ‘meat grinder’ of a war, Russian and Ukrainian casualties rise

Middle East conflict live updates: Netanyahu vows to invade Rafah regardless of cease-fire deal; Blinken in region

Parenting in Gaza today is so much more than keeping your children alive

Trump and allies say Biden pays rent for ‘illegals’ in Michigan. Not true.

Eighty percent of Ukraine-Israel bill will be spent in U.S. or by U.S. military

Facts in the Trump courtroom v. ‘facts’ in the court of public opinion

The Rick Steves guide to life

The sad, stale state of in-flight vegetarian meals

How to train for a marathon on vacation

An AI blood test purports to diagnose postpartum depression

Meta’s oversight body prepares to lay off workers

A TikTok ban could also end short-form video as we’ve come to know it

Trump trial live updates: Trump found in contempt for violating gag order

Trump Hush Money

Health

Well+Being

Opinions

Higher Education

Education

https://www.washingtonpost.com/coronavirus/

Coronavirus pandemic

Michael Sadler

CHICAGO — At 7 p.m. on Saturday night, my husband and I landed at O’Hare International Airport aboard a nonstop Turkish Airlines flight from Istanbul, returning home after 10 days in Qatar and Oman, where my husband had given a professional talk and we’d tacked on a vacation. We’d certainly been following the news about the progression of the covid-19 outbreak and President Trump’s <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/white-house-considers-moving-all-of-europe-to-level-3-travel-advisory/2020/03/11/844090d0-63bc-11ea-b3fc-7841686c5c57_story.html">knee-jerk travel ban</a>. But because we hadn’t visited any Level 3-designated countries and were asymptomatic, we stuck to our originally scheduled plan to fly back Saturday.

What we <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2020/03/14/europe-travel-ban-airport-delays/">encountered when we landed</a> was absurd. But more distressingly, it was dangerous — and it only happened because our government can’t figure out how to deal with the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/coronavirus/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">coronavirus</a>.

Upon deplaning, all the passengers on our flight, more than 350 of us, were ushered into a single line entering the international arrivals area. Our queue fed into a larger queue with others. Two things quickly became obvious: One, we weren’t getting home anytime soon. And two, anyone in this huge, smashed-together crowd who may have contracted the coronavirus was now potentially infecting others, who could in turn infect any number of additional people. The scene went from annoying to frightening. Passengers began posting photos of the nightmarish throng on social media. We hadn’t yet been given any sort of health forms to complete (unlike in the countries we’d visited), but we trusted we’d be receiving clear instructions about what would occur, since the whole point of the line was, supposedly, to deal with the health crisis. Those instructions never arrived; the only announcement made to the massive crowd came from a frustrated U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer, who shouted at everyone not to post photos on social media.

An airport security officer eventually handed out a one-sided form titled simply “UNITED STATES TRAVELER HEALTH DECLARATION.” The form bore no official markings or formal insignia of the United States or any federal agency. It <a href="https://twitter.com/tracysefl/status/1238993910879354882?s=20">looked like</a> an intern’s Microsoft Word busywork project. At least the health screening forms in the Middle East had included some clip art.

The coronavirus is here. Someone please tell us what to do.

It’s difficult to explain what exactly happened, because it was so unclear to us. But it seemed that a two-stop entry process had been put in place. First, travelers were sent through the normal customs and immigration entry points. (They’d closed all of the Global Entry kiosks, without explanation, so no one was able to use the shortcuts so many have grown dependent on — and which would have reduced the time we all spent in proximity to each other in line, though it would have meant we all touched the same screens.) At immigration, the officer stamped our passports — but then instructed us <i>not</i> to proceed to retrieve our baggage and exit, but rather to return to a new line. This, we were perfunctorily told, was for “screening.”

Again, we had not visited any Level 3-designated countries or any countries named in Trump’s newly announced travel ban. We were exhibiting no concerning health symptoms. Yet there we were, crammed together in a slowly moving line with hundreds, if not a few thousand, of other returning passengers, a sad scene where we remained for several hours.

My husband serves on the faculty of a medical school and is an expert on community health research. What was happening at O’Hare, he said to me and to those around us who had formed an alliance, was an obvious and utter failure of Public Health Prevention 101. It didn’t take his expertise to realize this: Children and babies were mixed in with elderly travelers, everyone exhaustedly shuffling along with their carry-on bags, inches apart, snaking back and around corners across the cavernous arrivals area. The odds of our contracting covid-19 were exponentially greater right then than in any of the countries we’d just visited halfway around the world.

We tried to address our concerns with various officials, from airport security to immigration officers, all of whom were polite but increasingly beleaguered by bottlenecked crowds and a broken process. We repeatedly sought out any Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials specifically, but none were visible among the throngs.

I ran the White House pandemic office. Trump closed it.

Travelers were growing rightly frustrated, particularly after the screening line came to a standstill for over an hour. We kept overhearing airport security personnel telling passengers to bear with them: “It’s Day One,” was the refrain, meaning the protocols were brand new. But that only underscores the rashness with which the Trump administration announced them. Authorities have known for weeks that the virus was a serious threat and spreading in the United States. The announcement of the ban came without a solid implementation plan. Standing in the airport, we became collateral damage, the real-life consequences of Trump’s rhetoric.

The illogic and absurdity of the scene would have been funny had it not felt so reckless and irresponsible. This protocol flew in the face of all advice about social distancing and included no discernible triage measures (save for passengers in wheelchairs, who were taken into another area we couldn’t see). It’s also unclear that any document management process was in place with the completed health forms. All the while, video screens were silently looping guidance to travelers in a font too small to be read.

After 4½ hours, we finally came face-to-face with a CDC official. She listened to us and carefully reviewed our forms. “You’re right, you don’t have to be here. You can go,” she said and apologized repeatedly that we’d been stuck there so long for truly no reason.

On our midnight car ride home, talking about how we would immediately begin a self-quarantine process as a precaution, we saw scores of green-attired St. Patrick’s Day revelers piling in and out of local bars. On Sunday afternoon, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot <a href="https://www.chicagobusiness.com/restaurants/lightfoot-limits-bar-capacity-curb-coronavirus-spread">announced a measure</a> to limit large gatherings; Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) has been <a href="https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/gov-pritzker-blasts-trump-administration-in-response-to-long-customs-lines-at-ohare/2237411/">excoriating the Trump administration</a> for its failure to enact a passenger screening system involving any practical safeguards. Late Sunday, he announced all bars and restaurants would soon be closed. But O’Hare necessarily remains open, and we have no faith that Trump’s plan is either working or keeping anyone safe.

Coming home has never felt quite so scary.

<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/03/15/chaos-dulles-airport-shows-how-not-handle-pandemic/" target=_blank>At Dulles, I encountered a case study in how to spread a pandemic</a>

<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/03/14/trump-cant-help-us-now-we-need-taylor-swift-lebron-james-kim-kardashian/">Trump can’t help us now. We need Taylor Swift, LeBron James and Kim Kardashian.</a>

<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/03/15/jared-kushner-must-be-able-challenge-president-trump-about-coronavirus/">Jared Kushner must be able to challenge President Trump about coronavirus</a>

Tracy Sefl is a Democratic communications consultant based in Chicago.

I flew into Chicago and landed in a public health debacle

The lines at the airport were caused by President Trump’s failure to get a handle on coronavirus policy