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Prior to the event, retired Army Lt. Col. Barnard Kemter had given a copy of his speech to the chair of the Memorial Day Parade committee and president of the Hudson American Legion Auxiliary, and she asked Kemter to remove a specific part of the speech regarding Black people's historical role in the holiday, the Legion said.

CNN has reached out for comment from Lee-Bishop Post 464, the post officer who resigned and the committee chairperson.The action taken by Post 464 "constitutes a violation of the ideals and purposes of the American Legion," the news release said.

State Rep. Casey Weinstein, a Democrat, who has called for action from the American Legion Department of Ohio, praised the decision in a tweet, saying the Legion had "handled the racist censorship of Lt. Col. Kemter with the seriousness it deserves. I am proud to accept their invitation to re-up my membership in the Legion as an at-large member of Department HQ Post 888."

Instead of a smile-and-wave final White House chapter, the couple are busy trying to keep the President from saying too little or too much, throwing themselves on a grenade they aren't certain will detonate but not able to take the chance either way.

Ivanka Trump was among those who pushed her father to make the Twitter video that ultimately got him banned in the wake of the riot,

From her office in the West Wing, Ivanka Trump was fielding calls from Capitol Hill politicians who were literally hiding from a vicious and violent mob. Sen. Lindsey Graham, a ubiquitous presence with the President during golf outings and holiday jaunts to Mar-a-Lago, could not get in touch with Trump to beseech him to publicly call for a stop to the insurrection, a source familiar with the conversation told CNN. So Graham called Ivanka Trump, pleading for her to help talk to her dad.

It was again Ivanka Trump key among the aides who pushed the President to issue a subsequent video in the wake of his impeachment, again denouncing any future violence or plots to wreak havoc across the country. There were no words of "love" this time.

"They're trying to keep what little is left for them in terms of sellable currency as Trumps," said one source, who added the change from "before insurrection" to "after insurrection" has moved the needle on the state of the Trump empire from perilous to dire.

"The proof here about how worried (the family) is is how quiet they are," said another source, who notes the muzzled Twitter screeds and the dialed-back bravado, most notably of Ivanka Trump's brothers Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump.

"The idea that anyone will forget that her father incited these attacks is about zero," said one political operative who has worked in Republican politics. "If she wanted future voters to overlook just how devastating the end of this administration is, that's a big lift."

In December, Trump and Kushner closed on the purchase of a $30 million plot of land on exclusive Indian Creek Island just north of Miami, with plans, friends say, to build a private estate. Murmurs that Trump wants to challenge Florida's GOP Sen. Marco Rubio for his seat in 2022 are growing -- or at least they were before the insurrection.

"Until there's real evidence that the Trump brand is diminished with the activist base and dominant MAGA wing of the party, and not merely among elected Republicans and establishment types, I think Ivanka would remain the clear front-runner against Marco Rubio," he said.

The Kushner-Trumps also have a cottage at Trump Bedminster Golf Club in New Jersey, which was recently renovated to add more bedrooms. It's possible they could land there for some amount of time, but politically New Jersey is not Trump country, either.

The most fractured of the bonds is likely the tenuous friendship Trump previously had with her stepmother, Melania Trump. The two women are undoubtedly the most powerful and influential in the President's life, and prior to the White House years both were aware and respectful of one another's turf, according to sources familiar with the dynamic. However, Ivanka Trump's perceived incursions into first lady Melania Trump's lane have led to tension between the women that's so bad, one source told CNN, there is little desire by either to be in the same room.

In recent months, Ivanka Trump and Melania Trump have not, in fact, been publicly photographed together, with the exception of the presidential debate in September and the Republican National Convention in August

At Thanksgiving, Ivanka Trump and the adult siblings went to Camp David, while Trump ate dinner at the White House with Melania Trump, Barron Trump and her parents. Over the Christmas holiday, Ivanka Trump and Kushner did not visit Mar-a-Lago as they had in years past. Though Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner have separate living space at Mar-a-Lago, where the outgoing first couple intends to live post-White House, one source said Melania Trump "hasn't exactly rolled out the welcome mat."

But if there were ever a time for the Trump family to get on with its bunker mentality and try for an image upgrade, it would be now -- or the hotels, real estate, branded retail and any future Trump-touched business entities could be irretrievably damaged. "I think this is one time the family has to acknowledge that their actions have had consequences," the source said.

as the federal government has left it to states to determine what to do with the vaccines it ships to them, and with some states pushing decision-making to local health departments and hospitals, the process has gone far from smoothly.

“There may have been an expectation from Operation Warp Speed or others that we’d give everyone the vaccine overnight.…It was a logistics equation for them. If you’ve been in vaccines for a long time, you know that’s the easy part. Getting it into actual arms is the hard part.”

Sen. Mitt Romney (R., Utah) criticized the vaccine rollout, saying in a statement that the lack of a comprehensive federal plan to be shared with states “is as incomprehensible as it is inexcusable.”

Public health officials and states say uptake is lagging for several reasons, beginning with holiday seasons that have kept staff of hospitals and nursing homes away from work. They also note they are facing high percentages of people, including some health-care workers, who are skeptical of taking the shots.

Hospitals and other sites are staggering appointments to avoid pulling too many workers from caring for patients amid a nationwide surge in Covid-19 cases, officials say. Administration of the vaccines also takes more time than a typical flu shot, particularly since they are being done in a socially distant way and may be preceded by a Covid-19 test.

Different state policies have led to confusion and shipment delays for hospitals, said Michael Wascovich, vice president of field pharmacy services for Premier Inc., a group purchasing organization whose members include 4,100 hospitals, 80% of which received doses.

“Every state is doing what they want to do,” he said. “You could be in Philadelphia and it’s completely different across the river if you’re in Trenton or Camden.”

Many states are following CDC guidelines to start with front-line medical workers and people in long-term care facilities, but not all. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Dec. 23 extended eligibility to people aged 65 and older. Because each county and hospital in the state implemented its own approach, many people didn’t know whether to call, log on or show up in person to secure a spot.

CVS has begun administering doses at nursing homes and facilities in 48 states and Washington, D.C., with most eligible residents agreeing to be vaccinated, said Chris Cox, a CVS executive who is overseeing the vaccination rollout for the pharmacy chain.

In some cases, residents haven’t been vaccinated because of active outbreaks at facilities, while other facilities have taken longer than others to schedule their vaccination clinics, a challenge exacerbated by the holiday season, Mr. Cox said.

We’ve taken the people with the least amount of resources and capacity and asked them to do the hardest part of the vaccination — which is actually getting the vaccines administered into people’s arms,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, the dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health.Coronavirus Briefing: An informed guide to the global outbreak, with the latest developments and expert advice.Sign UpFederal and state officials have denied they are to blame for the slow rollout. Officials behind Operation Warp Speed, the federal effort to fast-track vaccines, have said that their job was to ensure that vaccines are made available and get shipped out to the states. President Trump said in a tweet on Tuesday that it was “up to the States to distribute the vaccines once brought to the designated areas by the Federal Government.”“Ultimately, the buck seems to stop with no one,” Dr. Jha said.These problems are especially worrisome now that a new, more contagious variant, first spotted in Britain and overwhelming hospitals there, has arrived in the United States. Officials in two states, Colorado and California, say they have discovered cases of the new variant, and none of the patients had recently traveled, suggesting the variant is already spreading in American communities.The $900 billion relief package that Mr. Trump signed into law on Sunday will bring some relief to struggling state and local health departments. The bill sets aside more than $8 billion for vaccine distribution, on top of the $340 million that the C.D.C. sent out to the states in installments in September and earlier in December.

Over all, Maryland has given nearly 17 percent of its vaccine doses. In a Wednesday appearance on CBS, Gov. Larry Hogan attributed the slow process to challenges across the board — from the federal government not sending as many doses as initially predicted, to the lack of logistical and financial support for local health departments.

In a news conference on Wednesday, Operation Warp Speed officials said they expected the pace of the rollout to accelerate significantly once pharmacies begin offering vaccines in their stores. The federal government has reached agreements with a number of pharmacy chains — including Costco, Walmart and CVS — to administer vaccines once they become more widely available. So far, 40,000 pharmacy locations have enrolled in that program.

But public health officials warned that reaching these initial groups, who are largely being vaccinated where they live or work, is a relatively easy task. “This is the part where we’re supposed to know where people are,” said Dr. Saad B. Omer, the director of the Yale Institute for Global Health.

More than 27,000 new Covid-19 deaths have been reported in just the first 10 days of 2021, according to data from Johns Hopkins.

At this rate, more people could die from Covid-19 in January than any other month of this pandemic. December had a record high of 77,431 deaths due to Covid-19.

He also expressed concern about "the inevitable arrival of the more highly transmissible" strain of coronavirus that was first detected in the United Kingdom and has spread to at least eight US states, including California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, New York, Pennsylvania and Texas.

There were 129,229 Covid-19 patients in US hospitals on Sunday, according to the COVID Tracking Project -- the sixth highest figure recorded. It was the 40th consecutive day that US Covid-19 hospitalizations remained above 100,000.

CNN medical analyst and emergency physician Dr. Leana Wen echoed that statement, telling CNN's Ana Cabrera Sunday, "The individuals who did not use masks or social distancing at the Capitol probably are also not following these guidelines when they go back to their home communities."

In Kentucky, Gov. Andy Beshear said his state was seeing a "real and significant increase in cases and our positivity rate from people's gatherings around the holiday."

"This surge that we're in right now is at least twice the rate, the seriousness, of the previous surges that we have seen," the governor said Friday. "This is our most dangerous time."

There were 7,497 Covid-19 patients in Florida hospitals on Sunday, according to the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration. That's about 3,000 patients more than were hospitalized in the state about a month ago, on December 12, when the AHCA reported 4,343 hospitalizations.

"The speed with which we are reaching grim milestones of COVID-19 deaths and cases is a devastating reflection of the immense spread that is occurring across the county," Los Angeles County Director of Public Health Barbara Ferrer said.

"The best way to protect ourselves, slow the spread, and stop overwhelming our hospitals, is to pause participating in any activities that aren't absolutely essential," she said.

Meanwhile, the nation's Covid-19 vaccine rollout "is absolutely not working as intended," said Dr. Megan Ranney, a CNN medical analyst and an emergency physician.

"We have three times as many doses that have been distributed to states as have actually gotten in arms," she said. "We have to do something different, and we have to do something different now."

President-elect Joe Biden will aim to release nearly all available doses of Covid-19 vaccines in an effort to quickly ramp up the US vaccine rollout, a spokesman for his transition team said.

But it could also be risky, because the vaccines by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna require two doses administered weeks apart to be about 95% effective, and vaccine manufacturing has not ramped up as rapidly as many experts had hoped.

Officials aren't recommending patients delay receiving their second doses, she said. People should still plan to receive the second dose of Pfizer's vaccine 21 days after the first dose, and the Moderna vaccine 28 days after the first dose.

"Right now, the issue is not so much supply, but it's actually that last mile of getting (vaccines) from the distribution sites to, actually, people's arms," she said. "If we have more supply, that's not actually solving for the right problem."

If there isn't enough vaccine in reserve for people to received second doses, she said, "I think that could really fuel vaccine hesitancy and further erode public trust in these vaccines."

nd now, with headlines about the wealthy trying to pay to jump the line, and images of politicians getting vaccinated before many nursing home residents, it is so easy for some to fear that their time will never come. The vaccine selfies tell us to hold on.

When I work overnight, the hardest part is always the hour right before sunrise. In my exhaustion, my body’s ability to regulate temperature and my sense of time go haywire, and I often find myself reviewing lab reports while wrapped in a blanket from the blanket warmer, wondering why time feels as though it is moving backward.

The essence of Christianity revolves around the life, death and Christian beliefs on the resurrection of Jesus. Christians believe God sent his son Jesus, the messiah, to save the world. They believe Jesus was crucified on a cross to offer the forgiveness of sins and was resurrected three days after his death before ascending to heaven.

Christians contend that Jesus will return to earth again in what’s known as the Second Coming.

The Holy Bible includes important scriptures that outline Jesus’s teachings, the lives and teachings of major prophets and disciples, and offer instructions for how Christians should live.

Both Christians and Jews follow the Old Testament of the Bible, but Christians also embrace the New Testament.The cross is a symbol of Christianity.The most important Christian holidays are Christmas (which celebrates the birth of Jesus) and Easter (which commemorates the resurrection of Jesus).

Most historians believe that Jesus was a real person who was born between 2 B.C. and 7 B.C.

According to the text, Jesus was born to a young Jewish virgin named Mary in the town of Bethlehem, south of Jerusalem in modern-day Palestine.

The New Testament was written after Jesus’s death. The first four books—Matthew, Mark, Luke and John—are known as the “Gospels,” which means “good news.” These texts, composed sometime between 70 A.D. and 100 A.D., provide accounts of the life and death of Jesus.

Some of the main themes that Jesus taught, which Christians later embraced, include:Love God.Love your neighbor as yourself.Forgive others who have wronged you.Love your enemies.Ask God for forgiveness of your sins.Jesus is the Messiah and was given the authority to forgive others.Repentance of sins is essential.Don’t be hypocritical.Don’t judge others.The Kingdom of God is near. It’s not the rich and powerful—but the weak and poor—who will inherit this kingdom.

Many scholars believe Jesus died between 30 A.D. and 33 A.D.

Jesus was arrested, tried and condemned to death. Roman governor Pontius Pilate issued the order to kill Jesus after being pressured by Jewish leaders who alleged that Jesus was guilty of a variety of crimes, including blasphemy.

The Christian Bible is a collection of 66 books written by various authors. It’s divided into two parts: The Old Testament and the New Testament.

The Old Testament, which is also recognized by followers of Judaism, describes the history of the Jewish people, outlines specific laws to follow, details the lives of many prophets, and predicts the coming of the Messiah.

he aimed to reform Judaism—not create a new religion.

According to the Bible, the first church organized itself 50 days after Jesus’s death on the Day of Pentecost—when the Holy Spirit was said to descend onto Jesus’s followers.

Early Christians considered it their calling to spread and teach the gospel. One of the most important missionaries was the apostle Paul, a former persecutor of Christians.

Many historians believe Christianity wouldn’t be as widespread without the work of Paul. In addition to preaching, Paul is thought to have written 13 of the 27 books in the New Testament.

Early Christians were persecuted for their faith by both Jewish and Roman leaders.

n 64 A.D., Emperor Nero blamed Christians for a fire that broke out in Rome. Many were brutally tortured and killed during this time.

tarting in 303 A.D., Christians faced the most severe persecutions to date under the co-emperors Diocletian and Galerius. This became known as the Great Persecution.

When Roman Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity, religious tolerance shifted in the Roman Empire.

In 313 A.D., Constantine lifted the ban on Christianity with the Edict of Milan. He later tried to unify Christianity and resolve issues that divided the church by establishing the Nicene Creed.

When the Roman Empire collapsed in 476 A.D., differences emerged among Eastern and Western Christians.

In 1054 A.D., the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox church split into two groups

Between about 1095 A.D. and 1230 A.D., the Crusades, a series of holy wars, took place. In these battles, Christians fought against Islamic rulers and their Muslim soldiers to reclaim holy land in the city of Jerusalem.

In 1517, a German monk named Martin Luther published 95 Theses—a text that criticized certain acts of the Pope and protested some of the practices and priorities of the Roman Catholic church.

Luther’s ideas triggered the Reformation—a movement that aimed to reform the Catholic church.

As a result, Protestantism was created, and different denominations of Christianity eventually began to form

Catholic, Protestant and (Eastern) Orthodox.

Earlier in the week, Dr. Scott Atlas, a scientific adviser to President Trump, mocked the idea that older relatives would be put at risk over the holiday weekend, although there is ample medical evidence that seniors are much more likely to become ill if they are exposed to the virus and to die if they become sick.

An estimated 55 million Americans had planned to travel for the holiday, according to AAA Travel. But rising coronavirus infections, new quarantine rules and increased unemployment have combined to deter travelers in the past few weeks, and that number will be at least 10 percent lower now, the largest year-over-year decrease since 2008.

More than one million new cases have been reported in the past week alone. “Amid this critical phase, the C.D.C. is recommending against travel during the Thanksgiving period,” Dr. Henry Walke, Covid-19 incident manager at the agency, said at a news briefing.

Officials in California on Thursday announced a curfew aimed at trying to quickly curb a surge of new coronavirus infections. Nearly all of the residents of the nation’s most populous state will be barred from leaving their homes to do nonessential work or to gather from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m.

Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota and a member of Mr. Biden’s Covid-19 advisory board, warned that a Thanksgiving feast was the perfect setting for spreading the virus.

Colleges have encouraged students — many returning home for the remainder of the semester — to take a coronavirus test before they depart, but C.D.C. officials do not endorse testing before gathering for Thanksgiving.

The C.D.C.’s advice went so far as to urge people to speak in low voices, because shouting — or singing — can spread the virus. Only one person should serve the food, federal officials said.

In January, a 52-year-old Asian American woman was shot in the head with a flare gun, also in Chinatown.

84-year-old Vicha Ratanapakdee was going for a morning walk in his San Francisco neighborhood. Surveillance cameras captured a man running at him full speed and smashing his frail body to the pavement.

The Oakland Anti Police-Terror Project has asked people "to wear yellow to show you're in support of Chinatown seniors and businesses."

The more than two dozen recent assaults and robberies in the Bay Area mirror a national rise in hate crimes against older Asian Americans during the pandemic. From last March through the end of 2020, Kulkarni's group has documented nearly 3,000 incidents of anti-Asian hate across 47 states and the District of Columbia.

Despite arrests in some of the high-profile attacks, the violence has prompted many Chinatown businesses to reduce hours during a normally bustling shopping period ahead of Friday's Lunar New Year holiday.

Separately, more than 200 people across the area have volunteered to serve as "community strollers" in Chinatown starting next week.

"These attacks taking place in the Bay Area are part of a larger trend of anti-Asian American/Pacific Islander hate brought on in many ways by COVID-19, as well as some of the xenophobic policies and racist rhetoric that were pushed forward by the prior administration,"

"Racist rhetoric from the pandemic has targeted us as being the reason for the coronavirus," Wu says, singling out phrases used by former President Trump to describe the outbreak's origins.

Civil rights advocate Kulkarni also shared criticism of politically charged speech. "Oftentimes, perpetrators have used the exact language of the prior president, words like 'human virus, kung flu, China virus, China plague,' "Kulkarni says. "And sometimes they have even weaponized the former president himself saying 'Trump is going to get you, go back to your country.'

Across the bay in Oakland, Calif., police say they've added foot and car patrols and set up a mobile command post in Chinatown, measures the community welcomes.

"It's not unique to Chinatown or to the Asian community the increase in crime we've seen across the city and across the county, but we have seen in the last several weeks and month a very specific increase in crimes committed against Asians," O'Malley told a press conference in Chinatown.

"I believe there are some individuals in our community that have targeted people of different races," he says noting that some offenders may see Asian Americans as less likely report crimes to law enforcement.

The pandemic, chief Armstrong tells NPR, had certainly made it easier for criminals, with time on their hands, to mask up and often slip away unidentified. "That's why it's so important that businesses and others that have video that they share with us. The mask wearing, although it's required and I think very important for health reasons, it also is definitely a deterrence in identifying those that are responsible," he says.

President Biden, meantime, recently signed a memorandum pledging to combat anti-Asian and Pacific Islander discrimination. It was part of a series of racial equity-focused executive orders.

"What the incidents in the Bay Area remind us of is that action is needed now," Kulkarni says, "not a few months from now, not a few years from now."

The second wave of the pandemic would likely not hit before the fall, but a second peak in this first wave could be much sooner, officials said.

"A hallmark of coronaviruses is its ability to amplify in certain settings, its ability to cause transmission -- or super spreading events. And we are seeing in a number of situations in these closed settings. When the virus has an opportunity, it can transmit readily," Van Kerkhove said.

"This reckless behavior endangers countless people and risks setting us back substantially from the progress we have made in slowing the spread of COVID-19," County Executive Dr. Sam Page said in a statement.

In southern California, officials shut down the Eaton Canyon Natural Areas and Trails for part of Sunday and all of Monday after "overwhelming crowds," CNN affiliate KCBS reported.

"The large number of visitors to Eaton Canyon this weekend have made it evident that many people are not practicing key requirements and recommendations set forth by Public Health ... such as wearing face coverings, physical distancing and avoiding crowded areas," the department said, according to the affiliate.

Meanwhile, officials in at least 26 states are also investigating hundreds of cases of multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children, a condition doctors believe is linked to coronavirus.

Symptoms do not look like the classic symptoms of coronavirus and may mostly include stomach pain and vomiting, along with fever and perhaps a rash, the experts told other doctors during a meeting last week organized by the CDC.

President TrumpDonald John TrumpBiden says GOP senators have called to congratulate him Biden: Trump attending inauguration is 'of consequence' to the country Biden says family will avoid business conflicts MORE has been largely silent when it comes to warning the public about the need for precautions or announcing major new steps aimed at curbing the spread of the virus before a vaccine is widely available.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Robert Redfield warned on Wednesday that December, January and February are “going to be the most difficult time in the public health history of this nation.”

Even though some of those warnings were aimed at the public, the White House did not release the report and instead sent it privately to states. The document came to light only after it was leaked to the press.

The U.S. is already being hit with 150,000 new cases a day, as well as a record 100,000-plus coronavirus patients in hospitals and more than 2,500 deaths from the virus on Wednesday alone. Those numbers are expected to worsen as more people test positive after a surge of Thanksgiving travel and gatherings.

The White House coronavirus task force sent a report, dated Sunday, to states sounding the alarm on several fronts, including that “a further post-Thanksgiving surge will compromise COVID patient care, as well as medical care overall” as hospitals are overwhelmed.

state responses “remain inadequate” in “many areas” and called for measures like limiting or closing indoor dining, which many states have not done.

Trump administration health officials are issuing increasingly dire warnings about the coronavirus and its rapid spread across the country, drawing a sharp contrast to the president’s reluctance to acknowledge the severity of the crisis head-on.

Some health experts said that given Trump’s history of making skeptical and at times misleading remarks about the coronavirus, his relative silence on the topic might be better than having him undercut the messaging from public health agencies.

“I’d rather he be quiet than step on the message of the CDC, which appears to be waking back up and providing useful guidance.”

“He's been hard at work,” she added. “He's done I don't know how many coronavirus task force briefings from this podium. But the work he's done speaks for itself.”

When Trump has spoken about coronavirus recently, it has been to tout progress on the vaccine, which has indeed progressed at record speed and shown very promising safety and efficacy results. But the vaccine will not be widely available for several months, highlighting the need for other measures in the short term to get through the brutal winter months.

“If you can loot businesses, burn down buildings, engage in protest, you can also go to a Christmas party, you can celebrate the holiday of Christmas, and you can do it responsibly.

He said it should deal with the items that both sides can agree on now and expected that "the new administration" would be working on another package next year.

"Waiting for next year is not an answer," McConnell said. He also a spending bill being negotiated now by the House and Senate would serve as a vehicle for passing more pandemic aid.

The must-pass bill is a potential vehicle to attach coronavirus relief before lawmakers adjourn this Congress and head home for the holidays.

It seems like to me it's pretty late to decide you'd rather have something than nothing," Blunt said. "The whole idea of not being willing to negotiate until you're down to the last week of negotiating time usually doesn't produce a very good result.

"I think $900 billion would do a lot more good right now than $2 trillion will do in March. This is an important time to step up if we can."

Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., a key ally of Joe Biden's, said he didn't sign on to the proposal to avoid sending a signal that the president-elect is already on board. "I think it's important that I not be misperceived as supporting something on behalf of the incoming administration. I don't speak for them," Coons said.

And while he "celebrates" Pelosi's efforts to get a larger relief bill, he said it's time to reconsider with Congress running out of time.

And in the absence of anything — with two weeks before the holidays, essentially fewer than two — we have to do something," Phillips said. "So I encouraged her thoughtful consideration. It doesn't serve every need, every purpose. Not everybody will be thrilled. But this was based on not what do we want, it's what we can achieve."

“In a lot of ways, Iowa is serving as the control group of what not to do,”

Perencevich and other public-health experts predict that the state’s lax political leadership will result in a “super peak” over the holidays, and thousands of preventable deaths in the weeks to come. “We know the storm’s coming,” Perencevich said. “You can see it on the horizon.”

Joe English, a 37-year-old respiratory therapist, spends every day traveling between hospital units, hooking up seriously ill COVID-19 patients to ventilators or ECMO machines. When there’s nothing left to be done, English is the one who turns off those machines; he’s done so at least 50 times in the past few months. “What I’m seeing [among health-care workers] is just frustration, desperation,” English told me. “People have been acting like we’ve been fighting a war for months.”

There is a name for this feeling, says Kevin Doerschug, the director of the hospital’s medical ICU: moral distress, or the sense of loss and helplessness associated with health-care workers navigating limitations in space, treatment, and personnel

A recent New York Times analysis clearly showed that states with the tightest COVID-19 restrictions have managed to keep cases per capita lower than states with few restrictions.

What makes all of this suffering and death exponentially more painful is the simple fact that much of it was preventable

Democrats in Iowa believe that Reynolds’s inaction has always been about politics. Early on, she’d assumed an important role making sure that Trump would win Iowa in the November election, State Senator Joe Bolkcom, who represents Iowa City, told me. “She did that by making people feel comfortable” about going out to eat, going to bars, and going back to school. “She mimicked Trump’s posture” to get him elected. Ultimately, Reynolds was successful in her efforts: Trump won Iowa by 8 points. But Iowans lost much more.

Iowa’s problem is not that residents don’t want to do the right thing, or that they have some kind of unique disregard for the health of their neighbors. Instead, they looked to elected leaders they trust to tell them how to navigate this crisis, and those leaders, including Trump and Reynolds, told them they didn’t need to do much at all.

Which means that not only are health-care professionals tasked with saving sick Iowans’ lives, but it’s also fallen on them to communicate the truth about the pandemic.

The crisis in Iowa’s hospitals could be improved in a matter of weeks if Iowans started wearing a mask whenever they leave the house and stopped spending time indoors with people outside their households.

Without state leadership on board, none of those changes will happen. “The endgame of uncontrolled spread is a choice between massive death and suffering and overflowing hospitals, or shutting things down,” he said. “This is the equivalent [of] choosing between death or amputation—when you could have had an earlier surgery, which would have been painful but would have prevented this scenario from developing in the first place.”

Reynolds needs to order bars closed and restaurants to move to takeout only, at least until the surge is over, public-health experts told me. Reynolds and other state leaders could frame mask wearing and self-isolation as a matter of patriotic duty. “We need to make the right thing to do the easy thing to do,” T

right now, Iowa is on a disastrous path. Experts expect to see a spike in COVID-19 cases in the state roughly one week from now, two weeks after the Thanksgiving holiday. That spike will likely precede a surge in hospitalizations and, eventually, a wave of new deaths—maybe as many as 80 a day, Perencevich, the infectious-disease doctor, estimates. Add Christmas and New Year’s to the mix, and Iowans can expect to see nothing less than a tsunami

“I’ve seen a growing awareness, a wake-up, to the systemic oppression of people of color,” said Ms. LaDuke, an enrolled member of the White Earth Ojibwe Nation. “There is a movement toward justice for Native people. People want to listen.”

“There was an event that happened in 1621,” Ms. Coombs said. “But the whole story about what occurred on that first Thanksgiving was a myth created to make white people feel comfortable.”

In the period between Indigenous People’s Day and Thanksgiving, she said she is “inundated with people who might have some awareness with the pain over the characterizations that comes with this time.”

Hiʻilei Julia Hobart, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin, said current events allow students to see more clearly the shared legacies of African-Americans, many of whose enslaved ancestors were forced to work land stolen from Native Americans, whose agricultural know-how was also co-opted.

Congress may have to pass yet another short-term stopgap resolution to give them more time to find an agreement.

If a sweeping government funding bill is released without pandemic relief, that would spell serious trouble for the effort to pass Covid aid before Congress breaks for the holidays and could signal the impending demise of the last-ditch effort to secure a stimulus deal.

As of late Monday night, there still was no final consensus, with familiar sticking points: Democrats want state and local money to help ensure workers who provide vital services are not laid off. Republicans believe much of that money will be wasted. And the GOP lawmakers who are open to more state and local aid say there also need to be lawsuit protections for businesses and other entities, but Democrats argue that the GOP proposals on that idea go too far.

House and Senate appropriators are planning to unveil a $1.4 trillion spending bill Tuesday to fund federal agencies until the end of September 2021, which leaves little time before the Friday deadline for what's expected to be a massive package to pass both chambers.

It's clear to virtually everyone in Washington that a deal is within reach that includes several key provisions: An extension of jobless benefits, money for vaccine distribution, funds for schools, small business loans -- among a handful of other issues.

Self-imposed deadlines have a way of slipping in Congress and it's always possible lawmakers won't release a massive funding deal Tuesday despite their intention to do so. If that happens, it could mean that talks over both stimulus and government spending are breaking down and lawmakers may be forced to punt the issue further down the road by walking away from a pandemic stimulus deal during the lame duck session of Congress and passing a short-term funding patch rather than a far broader, comprehensive spending deal.

"Either 100 senators will be here shaking our heads, slinging blame and offering excuses about why we still have not been able to make a law -- or we will break for the holidays having sent another huge dose of relief out the door for the people who need it."

There were clear signs on Monday that Democrats could be forced to abandon a push for at least $160 billion in aid to cash-strapped states and cities in order to get a bipartisan agreement on some relief provisions.

during a 22-minute phone call Monday evening, the speaker told Mnuchin that the GOP insistence to include lawsuit protections for businesses and other entities "remain an obstacle" to getting an agreement on state and local aid -- since Republicans have demanded the two be tied together.

A bipartisan group of lawmakers unveiled the legislative text of a $908 billion compromise Covid relief plan on Monday

If the aid is ultimately dropped from the plan, it would amount to a major concession from Democrats, who had advanced roughly $1 trillion for aid to states and cities as part of a $3 trillion-plus plan that passed the House in May and that the Senate never considered. Democrats had argued the money was paramount to ensure that workers performing vital services -- ranging from first responders to health care workers -- could continue to say on the job.

If Democrats do drop their demand for state and local aid, the consensus bill put forward by the bipartisan coalition on Monday that sidesteps that issue as well as liability protections could serve as a ready-made starting point for what could be agreed to more widely on Covid relief.That bill has a price tag of $748 billion and includes policy ideas that have proven popular across party lines such as a boost to the Paycheck Protection Program

"I am convinced the majority leader will actually bring legislation to the floor that will either take up our $748 billion bill or the total of $908 billion, or perhaps he will pick and choose from what we put together in a bill of his own and attach it to the omnibus spending bill."

According to a summary released on Monday, the bill would provide $300 billion for the Small Business Administration and funds that would give small businesses the chance to benefit from another loan through the PPP with certain eligibility restrictions.There would be $2.58 billion for CDC vaccine distribution and infrastructure and an extension of pandemic unemployment insurance programs for 16 weeks along with a $300 per week expansion of federal supplemental unemployment insurance benefits

the same week the U.S. began the rollout of its COVID-19 vaccination program and surpassed 300,000 deaths from the virus.

comes on the heels of the Thanksgiving holiday, when many Americans gathered with family and friends against health officials' warnings. Authorities are concerned about a similar spike following the Christmas and New Year's holidays.

"We are still at a dangerous and critical part of this pandemic and tens of thousands of American lives are at stake really every week,"

Mailgun, the email delivery service used by Substack and Ghost, said the online publishing industry had more than quadrupled its sending volume over the last two years. The New York Times is continuing to add to its newsletter offerings for subscribers, including one written by the restaurant critic Pete Wells that just began as well as another by the opinion columnist Ross Douthat, a spokesman for the company said.

I’m sure the market for crappy newsletters few people are reading has collapsed,” Mr. VandeHei said. “It’s not peak newsletters — it’s the end of weak newsletters.

it is not just that Europeans spend a few extra weeks on the beach. The typical working day in Britain, France and Germany is half an hour shorter than in America, according to the International Labour Organisation.

which is the better way of living—with more money or more free time? The reality is that it is difficult for people to choose

Those in America work according to American schedules; those in Europe conform to European norms.

the more fruitful question is why Americans put in longer hours

the difficulty with chalking up the difference to culture is that until the early 1970s many Europeans worked more

A first guess suggests that culture might account for the variation in work hours. Maybe Europeans enjoy their leisure more. They are spoilt for choice about how to spend time off

As for Americans, surveys indicate that they view hard work as intrinsically worthwhile. “Rugged individualism” is, after all, what built the country.

The answer leads to a curious new observation: that remote work is making America’s office drones a little more European, albeit with a puritanical twist.

American working hours are basically the same now as back then. The big change is that Europeans now toil less. Hours are down a whopping 30% in Germany over the past half-century. Something beyond culture—a slow-moving, ill-defined variable—is at play.

Edward Prescott, an American economist, came to a provocative conclusion, arguing that the key was taxation

Until the early 1970s tax levels were similar in America and Europe, and so were hours worked. By the early 1990s Europe’s taxes had become more burdensome and, in Prescott’s view, its employees less motivated

A recent study by Jósef Sigurdsson of Stockholm University examined how Icelandic workers responded to a one-year income-tax holiday in 1987, when the country overhauled its tax system. Although people with more flexibility—especially younger ones in part-time jobs—did indeed put in more hours, the overall increase in work was modest relative to that implied by Prescott’s model.

A substantial gap persists today: American tax revenue is 28% of GDP, compared with 40% or so in Europe.

Regulation seems to matter more.

European rules give workers power, from generous parental-leave policies to stricter laws on firing staff. Many European countries try to put caps on working tim

most research agrees that they have reduced work hours.

Another important relationship is that, as people get richer, they typically want to work less

A recent paper by the IMF shows a remarkably strong link between GDP per person and hours worked in Europe. People in richer countries, such as the Netherlands, generally work less than those in poorer countries, such as Bulgaria.

Americans are wealthier than most Europeans, so why do they still work more?

Perhaps leisure is a collective-action problem. Americans may want to ask their bosses for longer holidays but are worried about being seen as slackers

A paper in 2005 by Alberto Alesina of Harvard University and colleagues argued that Europe’s stronger unions had in effect solved this collective-action problem by fighting for paid vacations, which ended up enshrined in law.

Europe’s well-regulated leisure time may then beget more leisure because it is more socially acceptable, and the market responds by supplying more good ways not to work. It is a virtuous cycle of lovely cafés.

One fascinating new development is a discrepancy in the rise of remote work

In 2023 the Global Survey of Working Arrangements found that full-time employees in America work from home 1.4 days a week, while those in Europe do so for 0.8 days

a striking result: Europeans and Americans now spend almost exactly the same amount of time in the office, with 1,320 hours a year for the former and 1,304 for the latter.

In other words, the extra 15% of work done by Americans annually is now from the comfort of their own homes—or occasionally on the beach, perhaps even one in Europe. Americans do still work harder, but rather more enjoyably than in the past