The just-passed HEROES Act is a massive relief package designed to alleviate the harm of a massive crisis. In it is the Emergency Broadband Benefit Program, which would make it easier for Americans affected by COVID-19 to stay connected to the Internet. As the Senate takes up this legislation, it should make Internet access a priority, not a bargaining chip.
The Emergency Broadband Benefit program mandates that ISPs offer a broadband service for free to COVID-19 impacted people that the government will pay $50 per month to cover ($75 per month for tribal lands). Internet Service Providers (ISPs) will also be required to offer the discounted promotional packages they offered as of May 1, 2020, which means any special offers an ISP was providing for high-speed service at an affordable price (including any teaser prices), will be locked in place for the duration of the emergency. The legislation would also abolish long term contracts consumers would be forced to sign to obtain those lower rates by prohibiting early termination fees. In many cases, this arrangement, even in cable monopoly markets, would guarantee that a COVID-19 impacted person could obtain high-speed access for free.
The legislation envisions authorizing the program with up to $8.8 billion and would be operational until September 30, 2021. Eligible households would have to meet one of the several criteria designed to capture Americans who are going to be most negatively impacted by COVID-19, most notably households that had a substantial loss of income since February 29, 2020, a documented layoff, or an application for unemployment. In essence, it is a federal guarantee to broadband access during this extremely challenging time.
Healthcare, job hunting, communication, schooling--the Internet is vital for the U.S. to weather this crisis. This is even more true for people who have lost jobs, students of all ages who depend on their parents Internet, and those living in rural, low-income, and tribal lands, which ISPs have failed to invest resources in. Internet access is not just a footnote in any relief packages, it is a priority.
The inevitable process of negotiating between the House and Senate will force elected officials to make choices on what will and will not be law. If you have a friend or family member who is facing serious economic hardship as a result of COVID-19, you need to contact your Senators and tell them to include free broadband access to the unemployed in whatever final package is produced from Congress.
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Podcast Addict, an Android podcast app with millions of users, was briefly suspended over the weekend because it lists COVID-19 content. The apps creator, Xavier Guillemane, tells The Verge that on Saturday, Google suspended and removed the ads from his nine-year-old app because it violated a new policy for developers that requires any app with a reference to COVID-19 to be published, commissioned, or authorized by official government entities or public health organizations.
After The Verge reached out, Google SVP of Platforms and Ecosystems Hiroshi Lockheimer clarified that Podcast Addict shouldnt have been removed, and the team is working to reinstate the app, a company spokesperson tells The Verge.
To ensure users of Google Play are getting authoritative and accurate health information, were continuing to take an intentionally cautious approach to apps with COVID-19 contentas outlined in our blog post for developers, the spokesperson said in an emailed comment. In this case weve reinstated the app and have communicated with the developer to ensure the app remains compliant with our policies.
Guillemanes app catalogs publicly available podcast RSS feeds, which he doesnt control. The content includes news shows, talk shows, and a variety of programming that mentions the pandemic and virus. He says Google told him hed need to address this problem and then republish his app under a different name to be reinstated. Guillemane says other podcasting apps, including Googles own, list these shows, as well, although he doesnt know what specific offending shows its algorithm flagged.
His app is free and relies on Google ads to make money, so when its demonetized, Guillemane also loses his income.
This is the way Im making my living, and already because of the current situation, our revenue has been really bad for the past few months, he says. Google originally said it could take seven days for him to hear back about his suspension appeal, which means lost money all that time. Its not easy to be at the mercy of just some algorithm banishing the application.
Listeners who already have the app on their phone could still access it, but they werent able to redownload it. New users also werent able to find it in Google Play. If Guillemane adjusted the app, and somehow removed all COVID content, hed have to change the name of the app and lose all its ratings and downloads. He tells The Verge he was almost to the 10 million download mark when Google suspended the app.
Google previously demonetized his app for linking out to explicit content, which Guillemane didnt host or create. The situation was similar in that the content is only cataloged by Podcast Addict, but Google punished the app and its creator for listing shows.
Of course, with the pandemic ongoing, people have rushed to make podcasts about the virus. Its timely and important. At the same time, some people have seized the attention to spread misinformation, which Google is attempting to quash with its new policy. Podcast app developers, however, are just surfacing the content, similarly to a search engine, so they cant necessarily filter out misinformation or individually screen every RSS feed and episode that populates. The policy might be well intentioned, but its hard to police.
Update 5/18, 10:29 PM ET: Updated to include Googles statement and its decision to reinstate the app.
Decatur-based Italian-American restaurant The White Bull, owned by chef Pasquale Pat Pascarella, is undergoing a quick renovation brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. The restaurant announced the temporary closure on Facebook two weeks ago. It reopens in June.
Pascarella tells Eater Atlanta they plan to redo the kitchen and upgrade the equipment, add floor-to-ceiling glass windows in the front of the restaurant, and create a back patio, which is currently in permitting with the city of Decatur. The latter allows the restaurant to expand its outdoor dining space, beyond the few small tables out front on the sidewalk.
Recent studies indicate people may be more susceptible to contracting COVID-19 within enclosed spaces, such as restaurant dining rooms. The cities of Dunwoody and Brookhaven now offer restaurants a temporary outdoor dining permit. The permit expands outside seating into parking spaces and other nearby common areas.
The chef says a retail section is being added to the front of the White Bull in order to continue selling the restaurants pastas, sauces, and meatballs something Pascarella began doing during the dining room shutdown. Like the retail portion of the restaurant, takeout and delivery will also become a permanent addition once the White Bull reopens next month.
This is us getting real and understanding that the world isnt going out for foie gras anymore. They want to see value. Pascarella says of the renovation in an email. [Were] changing the menu when we [re]open to six to eight appetizers of vegetables from local farms and eight to 10 pastas every night, plus one entree special.
The chef estimates about 50 percent of the staff at the White Bull was laid off when the restaurant pivoted to takeout and retail only two months ago. Some employees were absorbed into Pascarellas new Neapolitan pizza and Italian restaurant Grana, which opened in late March for takeout on Piedmont Avenue in Piedmont Heights.
Pascarella just received funding from the Payroll Protection Program (PPP) and plans to rehire the rest of the White Bulls staff over the next week in anticipation of the reopening in June. The PPP is part of the federal governments CARES Act, which allows small businesses to pay employee wages while closed due to the COVID-19 crisis.
Stay home if sick. Check the Georgia Department of Public Health website for guidance and updates on the latest number of reported COVID-19 cases. Numbers are now updated three times a day.
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When San Mateo Countys Health Officer announced Wednesday that businesses would be allowed to open for curbside and delivery activities on May 18, government officials in other counties were puzzled. But hardly surprised.
As recently as April 28, San Mateo denizens, at their Health Officers insistence, were barred from traveling more than five miles for recreational purposes. But, just two weeks later, San Mateo was officially announcing itd be opening up and essentially decoupling from the six counties that joined to issue the March 17 shelter-in-place order.
Has the cohesion between the six counties come undone? It sure looks that way. This may lead to breakage among the six counties, San Mateo County Supervisor David Canepa told us on Wednesday. We dont know yet.
What we do know is that on the day before San Mateo County announced it was loosening restrictions, it recorded nine deaths, its most in three weeks. The numbers in San Mateo are getting worse; theyre higher than in any other Bay Area county but San Francisco, noted a Bay Area government official.
Per the website CovidActNow which our Bay Area leaders do peruse San Mateos R0, its COVID growth rate, remains positive. Every sick person is, currently, infecting 1.06 more people. As of Friday, Santa Clara County, just to its south, had a negative growth rate of 0.86. San Francisco is at 1.08 (the citys health officials, however, peg us at a tally just below one down from 3.5 in March).
These differences, while apparently trivial, are far from that. This BBC chart indicates what even a slight difference in R0 means over time.
Officials I spoke to hailing from over bridges and across county lines saw San Mateos move to partially reopen as a concession to political and business pressure. And they predicted San Francisco would soon announce a similar plan to open up on May 18.
This actually occurred in the midst of one of our phone conversations.
Closing time at Pancho Villa.
Come Monday, some 95 percent of San Francisco businesses will be permitted to reopen, albeit with severe restrictions. Retail establishments will be operating on a curbside and/or delivery basis and warehouse-like facilities will do so in a reduced capacity.
What this means for the city is incredible, Mayor London Breed said at a Wednesday press conference. Its obviously great news for retailers, San Mateo Countys Canepa told Mission Local earlier in that day.
Well, hopefully. But that all depends it was incredible and great news for the Warriors when Kevin Durant suited up for Game 5. But it didnt end well.
The six counties and California writ large were supposed to re-open based on statistical measures; as Dr. Anthony Fauci has put it, the virus sets the timeline. But Breed has, for weeks, earmarked May 18 as the date to move things forward.
San Francisco health officials note that we have reached our goals of daily testing two people for every 1,000 city residents (thatd be about 1,600 tests per day). At a Friday UC San Francisco COVID-19 Town Hall, the expert panel spoke highly of the citys robust contact tracing program, our available hospital capacity, and our ramped-up testing and relatively low instance of positive tests.
But itd be harder to argue were adequately testing heavily enough among some of our most vulnerable populations nursing home residents and, especially, homeless people or SRO dwellers who would test positive, at a high clip, and throw off our citys numbers and narrative.
San Francisco has put the cart before the horse, said an out-of-county official. It has pre-judged the outcome.
But were far from the only ones.
A few weeks ago [Gov. Gavin] Newsom set up criteria for what it means to re-enter. And that criteria hasnt been completely followed, said Dr. John Swartzberg, a UC Berkeley clinical professor emeritus specializing in infectious diseases and vaccinology. I understand that theres tremendous political pressure on him, but when you set up criteria and dont follow it, it leads to confusion. And the last thing we want is confusion when dealing with a pandemic.
But we are a confused nation right now. And with county after California county pushing for variances to the state rules for re-opening, things are confusing here, too.
As for San Francisco, Swartzberg said that hes concerned: We may be taking a greater risk than we should be taking.
Dolores Park, March 16, 2020, 2:43 p.m. Photo by Emma Silvers
Swartzberg is an infectious disease specialist, but he knows that the commonality between death from COVID-19 and death from malnutrition is death.
If you dont have any money, that is dangerous to your health, too, he says. Its hard to be hypercritical of whats going on here. People are trying to do the best they can.
Thats along the lines of what Canepa said when asked if this was the time to open up San Mateo County.
Some people who are privileged can work from home. Others are not privileged. They have to work two or three jobs and unemployment is so high right now, he said. In my district, food lines are getting longer and people have trouble getting day-to-day necessities. Theres public health and economic health its chicken and egg, right?
Canepa is right. And San Francisco (and everywhere else) is facing a devastating budget shortfall, in part driven by vanishing sales tax revenue.
But balancing economic health vs. health from a deadly disease as an either-or is a false and destructive choice. And arbitrarily picking a date to re-open the economy is to use a highly technical term from Stanford School of Medicine assistant clinical professor and infectious disease specialist Dr. Jake Scott stupid.
In the past two months of sheltering-in-place, we havent yet developed a medical therapy thats effective against COVID-19, he says. The city has only just begun to engage in universal testing in skilled nursing facilities the driver for this states coronavirus casualties and has, markedly, not yet started systematic testing of congregate living facilities such as homeless shelters, let alone the citys burgeoning encampments.
As the Public Press reported last month, the city in fact pulled the plug on a plan to test its homeless shelter residents free of charge, in fact to instead focus on nursing facilities.
President Trump was rightly mocked for his rambling charge that COVID-19 testing was overrated because, when you test, you have a case. When you test, you find something is wrong with people. If we didnt do any testing, we would have very few cases.
But as long as San Francisco isnt testing aggressively among its most vulnerable populations, the citys prevalence count will be artificially tamped down.
Lights flicker from tent.
And testing is overrated if not coupled with aggressive contact tracing. It doesnt make sense to test someone and find out theyre positive if youre not going to find out who theyve had contact with and get them into quarantine, said Swartzberg. Gavin Newsom has asked for 20,000 people to be trained [as contact tracers] within a short period of time. Well, thats aspirational. I hope we can do it. But, in the long run, well probably need two to three times that many people.
San Francisco officials stressed that our growth rate has dropped to the point that a tentative re-opening was prudent. This is a meaningful step on the gradual path to the new normal, said Department of Public Health director Dr. Grant Colfax at Wednesdays press conference. And Breed insisted that now was the time to begin focusing on economic recovery.
But Scott insists that the good work weve done in the past two months has not tamped down the prevalence of the virus: It strikes me as naive to think that just because were tired of physical distancing and businesses being closed, okay, were done. We dont have efficacious medical therapies. We dont have a vaccine.
Due to the one- to two-week incubation period for COVID-19, it may be some time before we know whether Mondays move to loosen restrictions was prudent or merely wishful thinking masquerading as public policy.
Scott, for one, would only feel confident about re-opening the economy if we could test large swaths of the population and do contact tracing and isolation and ensure the most vulnerable populations were supported if there were outbreaks in long-term care facilities and among the homeless.
These populations, he notes, will be hit especially hard. What have we done to ensure theyll be safe? What do they get out of restaurants reopening?
He answers his own question: Theyre going to get sick.
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CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa (KCRG) - Officials at a Linn County hospital have confirmed that they are treating the children with a rare inflammatory response to the novel coronavirus.
A spokesperson for UnityPoint Health-St. Luke's Hospital said that they are treating two patients with pediatric multi-system inflammatory syndrome, or PMIS. The syndrome appears to be related to post-infection inflammation of the body's blood vessels, including those in the heart, according to officials. It is similar in presentation to Kawasaki's disease, another rare post-viral illness that affects children.
Officials were not able to provide any more information about the patients, citing privacy concerns.
Symptoms of the syndrome include a persistent high fever for more than three days, rash, and abdominal pain. It can sometimes lead to hospital admission to manage low blood pressure and related complications in severe cases, the spokesperson for UnityPoint Health said.
Most children do not experience the same serious respiratory issues that adult cases have seen, according to UnityPoint Health, but this new syndrome has shown up in some children post-infection.
Earlier on Monday, state epidemiologist Dr. Caitlin Pedati confirmed that there were now two reported cases of the illness. UnityPoint did not specifically confirm that these were the same patients, though Pedati said both cases were in eastern Iowa.
Pedati and UnityPoint Health both stressed that the best way to avoid the risk, albeit rare, to children from this syndrome is to take proper steps to avoid potential exposure to the virus, including proper social distancing, hand washing, and keeping them away from people who have confirmed cases of COVID-19.
The government is coming under pressure to provide back-to-work support for young people amid evidence that the under-25s have been hardest hit by the Covid-19 economic fallout.
In a report published on Tuesday ahead of unemployment figures expected to show the first signs of the pandemics impact on the labour market, the Resolution Foundation said younger and older workers were the most likely to have lost their jobs or had their incomes reduced.
The thinktank said ministers should be considering job guarantees to prevent young people being permanently scarred by the crisis.
Maja Gustafsson, researcher at the Resolution Foundation, said: Our research confirms fears that young people are being hardest hit in the current crisis. One in three young people have been furloughed or lost their jobs completely, and over one in three have had their pay reduced since the crisis started.
Large numbers of young people are employed in the sectors most severely affected by the lockdown such as leisure, retail and hospitality.
The Resolution Foundation said 23% of employees aged 18-24 had been furloughed and a further 9% had lost their jobs completely. By comparison, among the least affected age group those aged between 35 and 44 15% had been furloughed or lost their jobs.
Young people were also the most likely to have had their pay cut, with 35% earning less than they did at the start of the crisis and 9% earning more.
Employment and wages data to be released by the Office for National Statistics on Tuesday will cover the quarter ending in March and include the first few days of the lockdown.
Gustafsson said young people were not the only group who were experiencing big income shocks. Britain is experiencing a U-shaped living standards crisis, with workers in their early 60s also badly affected.
That is why the governments strategy to support the recovery should combine targeted support to help young people into work, with more general stimulus to boost demand across the economy and help households of all ages.
Stephen Evans, chief executive of Learning and Work Institute, said: Our research shows five years of employment growth was wiped out in one month. The governments actions have prevented things being worse. But we need to act now to prevent permanent damage to our economy: investing in young people; mobilising back-to-work support; and making sure we help those left behind before the crisis.
DAKAR, Senegal In the northern Nigerian city of Kano, some people say they now get four or five death notices on their phones each day: A colleague has died. A friends aunt. A former classmate.
The gravediggers of the city, one of the biggest in West Africa, say they are working overtime. And so many doctors and nurses have been infected with the coronavirus that few hospitals are now accepting patients.
Officially, Kano has reported 753 cases and 33 deaths attributed to the virus. But in reality, the metropolis is experiencing a major, unchecked outbreak, according to doctors and public health experts. It could be one of the continents worst.
The coronavirus has been slower to take hold in Africa than on other continents, according to the numbers released daily by the World Health Organization.
But blazing hot spots are beginning to emerge. Kano is only one of several places in Africa where a relatively low official case count bears no resemblance to what health workers and residents say they are seeing on the ground.
In Somalias capital, Mogadishu, officials say that burials have tripled. In Tanzania, after cases suddenly rose and the United States Embassy issued a health alert, the Tanzanian government abruptly stopped releasing its data.
Kanos state government, until recently, claimed a spate of unusual deaths was caused not by the coronavirus, but by hypertension, diabetes, meningitis or acute malaria. There is little social distancing, and few people are being tested.
The leadership is in denial, said Usman Yusuf, a hematology-oncology professor and the former head of Nigerias national health insurance agency. Its almost like saying there is no Covid in New York.
He said he thought a significant portion of the population was probably infected in Kano, a city with an estimated five million people (though there has been no census since 2006).
Though they have now acknowledged they have a problem with Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, the authorities in Kano spent precious weeks denying it, despite the surge in what Abdullahi Umar Ganduje, the state governor, called mysterious deaths.
So far, theres been nothing to suggest that they are linked with Covid-19, Mr. Ganduje posted on Twitter on April 27, when, according to doctors in Kanos hospitals, the city was already firmly in the grip of a serious coronavirus outbreak.
There was nothing mysterious about what doctors said they were seeing at Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital, the citys main public hospital. Starting well before Kanos first case was reported on April 11, the hospital saw a steady stream of older patients with fevers, coughs, difficulty breathing and low oxygen saturation levels, many of them with underlying health conditions.
Doctors at the hospital called the governments response team. Sometimes it took 24 hours to get a call back. Sometimes, the team refused to test or isolate patients, saying they did not qualify because they had not traveled recently.
About 60 to 70 percent of the elderly patients who went to the hospital and later died had arrived with full symptoms of Covid-19, said a doctor in the medical department, who, along with another doctor, spoke on condition of anonymity because they feared retribution.
One doctor said the departments death registers for April showed far more patients had died than normal. Most patients were sent home, he said, and the hospitals staff members often would hear later that they had died.
With no personal protective equipment except surgical masks, the doctors said they knew the risks they were running in treating these patients. They said that they begged the hospital management for N-95 masks, face shields, gloves and aprons, but that none came. They asked for an isolation center at the hospital, scared that patients with other ailments would be infected. They wanted the facilities fumigated. Nothing happened.
And then it was too late. The doctors began to get sick.
All of us were exposed, said the other doctor. Ultimately, what we feared has happened.
Twenty of the 91 doctors in the hospitals medical department tested positive, the doctors said. Overall in Kano, 42 doctors and 28 nurses have tested positive, and one doctor has died, according to Dr. Sanusi Bala, chairman of the Kano branch of the Nigerian Medical Association. Laboratory technicians in what was then Kanos only testing laboratory got sick too, and it closed for several days. The citys health system, already extremely limited, was crippled.
Nigeria, a country of about 200 million people, says it can in theory do 2,500 tests a day, and Kano up to 500. But it has been conducting far fewer tests, typically 1,000 to 1,200 daily. Test results in Kano can take two weeks. Doctors awaiting their test results cannot go to work. People in quarantine cannot leave.
If I say thousands of people are dying from Covid, I dont think I exaggerated the figure, said the doctor who begged for P.P.E. So many people are dying without being tested, without even going to the hospital.
While the government loosened lockdowns on May 4 in the capital, Abuja, and biggest city, Lagos, it extended the one in Kano. But few people observe it. The many funerals are well attended, residents said.
Many in the city think the coronavirus is a hoax, perhaps because public messaging about it is mostly in English, which most Kano residents do not speak, health experts said.
Others believe that a Covid-19 diagnosis is a death sentence, the experts said, and do not want their neighbors to think they are infected. So they avoid being tested, and try to behave as if all is normal.
They go to burials, and shake fellow mourners hands because it would be socially unacceptable not to. They shop, barefaced, in crowded markets. They hold soccer tournaments a recent one was called the Coronavirus Cup.
While the situation in Kano is grim, the picture varies greatly from one country in Africa to another.
From the numbers gathered by the World Health Organization and other groups, Djibouti, in East Africa, looks as if it has the highest infection rate per capita on the continent, at 1 in 746 people. But public health officials interviewed there attribute that to aggressive testing and contact tracing. Anyone who tests positive is hospitalized, even if no symptoms are apparent.
Tanzania has reported 509 cases, but it stopped releasing data two weeks ago, and the United States Embassy there said on Wednesday that the risk of contracting Covid-19 was extremely high. A government spokesman told the BBC that testing had been suspended while the authorities investigated the many testing kits, but denied that Tanzania was doing too little to stop the viruss spread.
In Somalia, more than 1,200 people have tested positive and, officially, 53 have died. But doctors, officials and humanitarian workers think these numbers are way off. Thousands of people with the virus are staying home and not getting tested, they say.
The office of the Somali prime minister, which is overseeing the response to the outbreak, has dismissed the notion of a hidden toll, saying Mogadishu has already reached its peak.
Dr. Mohamed Abdi Hassan, who is leading the medical response to Covid-19 at the prime ministers office, said that there might be cases here and there that abruptly died and then were buried, but that the number of instances in which people had died of the coronavirus without being tested had been exaggerated. We have as much as possible captured the real picture.
In Nigeria, some say that with the outbreak in Kano so widespread, the city may already be home to a giant, unintentional experiment in herd immunity.
The disease is taking its natural course, said Dr. Faruk Sarkinfada, a medical microbiologist who works in Kano.
Eighty percent of tests conducted in the city are coming back positive, a presidential task force sent to Kano in late April told the BBCs Hausa-language service.
But since no one trusts the official reports, Kanos citizens have come up with their own ways of gauging the toll of the virus.
Nazir Adam Salih, a writer and engineer, conducted an impromptu survey of more than 100 acquaintances. Almost all said they had fever, cough and loss of smell. Almost none had gotten tested or treated.
Doctors phone relatives of the dead to conduct verbal autopsies.
By late April, the Kano state government finally admitted there was a Covid-19 problem and asked the federal government for help. Dr. Sarkinfada, the medical microbiologist, said that the federal government focused its efforts on increasing Kanos testing capacity, and that test results were now coming in sooner.
The Kano situation has seen us through deception, denial, defiance, denunciation, disagreement and finally acceptance and action to control the disaster, said Oyewale Tomori, a virologist who leads a Nigerian government committee on Covid-19.
Kanos location, population and connectivity to the rest of the region mean the consequences of an uncontrolled outbreak could be severe.
Already there are reports of hundreds more people dying mysterious deaths in Nigerias northern states of Jigawa, Yobe, Sokoto and Katsina, including three emirs, or traditional Muslim rulers, and a former health minister.
If Kano falls, the whole of northern Nigeria falls. The whole of Nigeria falls, Dr. Yusuf said. It spreads into the whole of West Africa and the whole of Africa.
Abdi Latif Dahir contributed reporting from Nairobi, Kenya, and Simon Marks from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
Officials with the federal governments 401(k)-style retirement savings program announced last week that new loan and withdrawal options enabled by the passage of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act will be available to federal employees and retirees this summer.
The CARES Act, signed by President Trump in March, offers a number of avenues by which participants in 401(k) and equivalent programs can seek relief. The Thrift Savings Plan has already implemented some of those provisions, including the suspension of requiredminimum distributions andwaiving or delaying tax penalties associated with a variety of existing withdrawals and loans, provided a participant has experienced negative consequences of the coronavirus pandemic.
On May 14, the TSP announced that new temporary withdrawal and loan programs authorized by the CARES Act would be implemented this summer.
Under the new loan program, the maximum loan amount available to participants will increase from $50,000 to $100,000, and the portion of a participants available balance that can be borrowed will increase from 50% to 100%. Additionally, participants may elect to suspend payments on a TSP loan for up to 12 months, although it also will extend the life of the loan by 12 months.
This applies to existing loans and loans taken in the remainder of 2020, officials wrote. We will make a new form available for you to request this suspension. You have until December 31, 2020, to have your payments suspended.
The new loan options will be available by June 22, officials said.
Beginning in mid-July, the TSP will offer what is called a CARES Act Withdrawal, which allows qualifying participants to make a one-time withdrawal of up to $100,000 from their accounts. For current federal workers, the typical requirement that a participant be at least 59 1/2 years old or cite a specific financial hardship, as well as the 10% tax penalty, would be waived.
In order to qualify for these loan and withdrawal options, participants or their spouses must have been diagnosed with COVID-19 or SARS-CoV 2, or participants must beexperiencing adverse financial consequences as a result of being quarantined, furloughed or laid off due to the virus. Those who cannot work because of child care or other dependent care obligations, and business owners who have had to close or reduce their hours as a result of the pandemic also would qualify for these new transactions.
Decatur, GA The DeKalb County Board of Health will deploy two community testing teams to address health disparities and high numbers of COVID-19 cases in identified DeKalb County zip codes.
The board eventually wants to deploy a total of six testing teams.
Starting May 20, the teams will be stationed at the following locations from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., Monday through Friday.
Beulah Missionary Baptist Church, 2340 Clifton Springs Rd., Decatur, Ga. 30034
Rehoboth Baptist Church, 2997 Lawrenceville Hwy, Tucker, Ga. 30084
COVID-19 testing is free and open to everyone. But registration is required.To register online, visit dekalbhealth.net, or call the DeKalb County Board of Healths COVID-19 Call Center at (404) 294-3700, Option 1, the county Board of Health says.
Getting tested for COVID-19 is now more urgent than ever, and more available, DeKalb County District Health Director S. Elizabeth Ford said in the announcement. We must be accessible to those who dont have the resources to travel great distances for testing. By going into ZIP Codes with the greatest COVID-19 burden, we can identify cases and protect the community. We will also be looking at areas that may not have high burden because testing has not been made available.
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