The associations -- including ATTAC (Association for the Taxation of financial Transactions and Aid to Citizens) -- wrote that people in working class neighborhoods were on the front lines as essential workers. "Yet social inequalities, already glaring, are reinforced by the management of the coronavirus and will explode with the economic and social crisis to come."
In stark contrast, wealthy residents at one of the country's most exclusive gated communities on the French Riviera have been embroiled in controversy after it emerged that some had access to antibody testing, despite the strain on hospitals and nursing homes across the country.
Tensions flare in Parisian suburbs
The tensions in Paris's northern suburbs flared up after an incident last Saturday night, when a motorcyclist, who is of a minority ethnicity, in the Villeneuve-la-Garenne banlieue broke his leg after police opened a car door in his path. Police said in a press release that the incident was an accident that occurred as officers got out of the car to speak with the motorcyclist, claiming 50 people then targeted police with projectiles.
The motorcyclist's lawyer, Stephane Gas, has asked for an investigation into the police's behavior by the General Inspectorate of National Police (IGPN), telling CNN that the police's characterization of the incident was "all upside-down."
He said the officers had opened the car door "in the middle of the lane" without warning before the collision. "All I can do is ask questions," he said.
"People can see the double standards enacted during the confinement. All these images of people walking in the streets in Paris, unbothered by the police. All these images of police brutality in the suburbs."
Bouhafs said the lockdown has taken a far harsher toll on working class families in the banlieues than on middle-class French households. "Confinement is not experienced in the same way by everyone," he said. "We don't all have terraces with neighbors playing the accordion.
"In the suburbs there are large families in low-rent housing with eight people or more ... These people are cashiers, delivery men, postmen, people who don't have the privilege of working from home."
There have now been more than 120,000 cases and more than 22,000 deaths in France.
Castaner said in the Senate that since Saturday there had been "ambushes" on police, which he condemned "in the strongest possible terms."
"Have no doubt: we are ensuring that containment is respected everywhere in France, and wherever our security forces are questioned and provoked. We owe them protection, we do so and we must punish this in the strongest possible way," he added to the Senate.
Wealthy enclave embroiled in bitter row
Calls to support disadvantaged groups in the suburbs of Paris came as another coronavirus row unfolded on the other side of the country, in one of the most privileged enclaves of Saint-Tropez, the star-studded French Riviera playground of the rich and famous.
CNN has contacted Les Parcs' association president, Jean-Louis Oger, but has not received a response.
One local told the Post that people in St-Tropez were "furious" that residents of the high-end estate, where some mansions are worth tens of millions of dollars, had access to antibody tests while regional hospitals were struggling and work was still being done to expand testing in nursing homes.
Saint-Tropez Mayor Jean-Pierre Tuveri said in a press release that there was a medical center but reports of Covid-19 testing for rich residents were "erroneous." He said the tests that did take place were free trial antibody tests for a laboratory, which would need to be authorized for marketing and public use through the non-profit foundation Institut Pasteur.
Tuveri said there was "no way, since this test has not yet been validated, it could have been offered to the nursing home's staff, to residents and even less to the population of Saint-Tropez."
Aurlie Perthuison, press officer for Institut Pasteur, told CNN it was "not aware of the use of tests among the inhabitants of this city" and was " not involved and was mistakenly quoted in a press release."
Perthuison said that no industrial serological test had been validated by the Ministry of Health. "As such, it is impossible for a private laboratory to carry out live tests on a population," she said.
She said that "all seroprevalence studies must be conducted in a formal setting" with oversight. "At present, only one seroprevalence study has been finalized, and it was conducted in Crpy-en-Valois, by our teams in conjunction with the French health authorities."
A spokeswoman for the Regional Health Agency (ARS) for Provence-Alpes-Cte d'Azur said: "The ARS is looking into the matter. We were not aware of this testing operation before the publication in the press."
Whatever the case in St.-Tropez, the rising anger seen on the streets of Paris shows just how the pandemic is exacerbating inequalities, according to activists and health professionals including Abdelaali El Badaoui, nurse and founder of the Banlieues Sant association, who lives in the city's northern suburbs.
"As health professionals working in these areas, we foresaw that we would be hit particularly hard, given the multiple layers of social and health inequalities there," El Badaoui, whose association works against medical and social inequalities in underprivileged areas, told CNN.
He said the organization had a plan in place for the health crisis in Seine-Saint-Denis as early as mid-March. It is distributing parcels of food and hygiene products as well as sharing videos it has made translating government and public health messages in 20 different languages.
El Badaoui said people who had lost their jobs were "really struggling" and the organization had seen some who had not eaten for a week. "People are not realizing it yet, but there is going to be a crisis like we've never seen before," he said.
Others had stopped getting essential medical treatments because they were frightened to leave home or did not know how to contact health services.
"Not everyone is equal in front of this health crisis. And everyone should be," he said.
"Coronavirus did not create the social crisis, coronavirus simply showed the level of misery that some people are living in right now. I think people should take it as a lesson, and remember it in order to do better in the future.
"Coronavirus should be an opportunity to change the way we engage with people who face inequalities on a daily basis."
Benjamin Berteau and Barbara Wojazer reported from Paris, Emma Reynolds wrote in London.
Yet the administrations reliance on its projections has nevertheless frustrated much of the public health community, which cautions that IHME has not hewed to traditional disease modeling procedures or incorporated crucial variables. The result is a rosier picture of the crisis than the one portrayed by much of the rest of the modeling world.
The IHME model is an odd duck in the pool of mathematical models, said Gregg Gonsalves, an epidemiologist at the Yale School of Medicine. I fear the White House is looking for data that tells them a story they want to hear, and so they look to the model with the lowest projection of death.
At the center of those concerns is a key element, the IHME models critics say. The projection makes no attempt to account for the virus defining characteristics, such as how easily it spreads or how long someone can be infected before they show symptoms.
Instead, it relies on data from cities already hit by the coronavirus, including in Italy and China, and matches the U.S. to a similar curve. The result is a projection thats easily digestible and more precise in its predictions than most infectious disease models, but far more volatile as the situation plays out on the ground.
The IHME has made frequent revisions to its model over the past month. Since April 9, for example, its forecast of the nations death toll had risen from around 61,000 to closer to 70,000, before adjusting back down to roughly 67,000 people.
Each of its projections also includes an upper and a lower boundary, mapped out by a shaded area, which range from as few as 48,000 a figure the U.S. has already surpassed to as many as 123,000 deaths.
Its a statistical model fitting the curves of epidemics in China and other places to what they think might happen in the U.S., Gonsalves said, and then constantly refitting based on new data.
IHME Director Christopher Murray defended his teams work as rigorous and among the best models available, arguing that the forecast simply seeks to achieve different goals than more traditional projections. The model was originally meant to help hospitals predict their supply needs, as providers across the world braced for a wave of coronavirus patients.
Were willing to make a forecast. Most academics want to hedge their bets and not be found to ever be wrong, Murray said. Thats not useful for a planner you cant go to a hospital and say you might need 1,000 ventilators, or you might need 5,000.
He added that IHMEs model is far more optimistic than others in large part because it heavily accounted for the impact of social distancing a decision Murray credited for helping pinpoint the pandemics national peak even as others warned of continued massive growth in cases.
Were orders of magnitude more optimistic. On the other hand we also called the peak correctly, he said. We believe in fitting models to data, and not making an assumption and then saying how my assumption would play out in a hypothetical world.
Thats caught the attention of the 2 million to 4 million people among them numerous public-health officials and hospital administrators who visit the site every day. Its also won the trust of the Trump administration, which first contacted IHME in late March as it was scrambling to allocate limited supplies and head off an overwhelming of the health system, and has continued to swap data and observations with the group ever since.
As IHME grew more confident in early April that the nations abrupt lockdown had begun to work, so did top public health officials.
Shortly after IHME debuted its 60,000-death forecast, Fauci on April 8 echoed the sentiment, saying the administration now believed the eventual toll would be "more like like 60,000 than the 100,000 to 200,000" deaths health officials previously estimated.
But the White Houses coronavirus task force has in recent conversations with the group focused on a new challenge: How to navigate a gradual reopening of the country, representing a new phase that will be far more difficult to model.
That just opens up a whole new set of challenges, Murray said, noting that Georgia whose governor, Brian Kemp, has called for businesses to reopen far sooner than his counterparts in other states hasnt even hit its coronavirus peak under the IHME model.
If Georgias going to have a resurgence, what about the neighboring states? Murray said.
Compounding those concerns is what he called a disturbing trend of slower drop-offs in new cases in some countries like Italy, a signal that the crisis could persist for longer than expected.
The fight against coronavirus will not be won until every country in the world can control the disease. But not every country has the same ability to protect people.
For low-income countries that struggle with weak health systems, large populations of impoverished people and crowded megacities, "there needs to be a very major adaptation" to the established measures we've been using to fight COVID-19, says Dr. Wafaa El-Sadr, an epidemiologist and director of ICAP, a global health organization at Columbia University.
The COVID-19 playbook that wealthy nations in Europe, Asia and North America have come to know stay home as much as possible, keep a six foot distance from others, wash hands often will be nearly impossible to follow in much of the developing world.
"I think they're trying, but it's not easy," El-Sadr says. "Ministries of health are working, partnering with international organizations to try to innovate and hopefully, if the innovation works, it can be scaled up."
Here are some of the solutions now being tried.
Problem: Countries in the developing world face massive shortages of medical gear like personal protective equipment, says Avril Lenoir, executive director of Doctors Without Borders. And the cutback in commercial flights has made it difficult to bring in equipment.
Solution: The U.N. has launched what it's calling "solidarity flights" hiring charter planes to airlift millions of face masks, face shields, goggles, gloves, gowns and other supplies. On April 14, the U.N. dispatched an Ethiopian Airlines charter flight from Addis Ababa full of COVID-19 gear to transport to countries in need.
"This is by far the largest single shipment of supplies since the start of the pandemic, and we will ensure that people living in countries with some of the weakest health systems are able to get tested and treated," said Dr. Ahmed Al-Mandhari, WHO regional director for the Eastern Mediterranean in a statement.
Assessment: "In the short run, a program like this is fine so long as we're dealing with an acute event," says El-Sadr. "Without [supplies like] PPE, you're at risk of losing your scarce and precious health workforce and you want to protect them at any cost."
But hiring chartered flights to deliver any kind of aid instead of commercial flights is expensive, says Manuel Fontaine, director of emergency programs at UNICEF. The U.N. is calling on donors to provide $350 million to continue this program; so far, it has received $84 million.
Problem: How do you protect the most vulnerable individuals in crowded cities and refugee camps? And how do you keep infected individuals from spreading the disease?
Solution: Health authorities are trying out a somewhat controversial strategy: separating the sick and those at high risk, moving them from the homes where they might live alone or with an extended family into vacant homes or taking over facilities previously used for other purposes, such as learning centers. The people being targeted include the elderly and those with preexisting health conditions that make them susceptible to COVID-19 as well as the homeless.
The strategy has been cited by several health researchers as a practical way to control the spread of disease in densely packed communities. Francesco Checchi of the London School of Tropical Health and Medicine wrote a paper on the subject, and Dr. Paul Spiegel of Johns Hopkins University, in another paper, recommended this as a potential solution in refugee settings.
Assessment: In his paper, Spiegel warns that the strategy of isolating these groups are "novel and untested." And thus far, in parts of the developing world where the strategy has been rolled out, it has had mixed results.
Shah Dedar, an aid worker with the humanitarian group HelpAge, says that religious and community leaders among the Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh don't like the idea of taking the sick or the elderly from the families who might care for them. But "elderly men and women with chronic diseases [who lived alone] were very much keen to the idea and appreciated the initiative," says Dedar.
While HelpAge was able convince local Rohingya leaders to give it a try, Spiegel of Johns Hopkins University says that this may not always be possible. In the case of a severe outbreak, aid workers may have to forcibly separate populations, whether the community approves or not. And he warns that this shielding measure is no guarantee it will keep the virus at bay it could spread within these facilities, as has happened at some nursing homes in the U.S.
And in Cape Town, South Africa, conditions in a homeless "camp" set up by the government have prompted complaints from the residents about close contact and lack of sanitation and a call from Doctors Without Borders to shut it down.
Problem: Some citizens are afraid of staying in big cities where social distancing is hard to maintain and outbreaks are more likely to spread.
Solution: Those who have family in ancestral homelands are traveling back to stay in these rural environments it's happened in countries ranging from Bangladesh to Italy.
Assessment: Both government officials and citizens have criticized this exodus, saying that it puts elderly people in those rural environments at risk if the city dwellers might be contagious yet asymptomatic or presymptomatic.
The other downside of fleeing to these more remote areas, says El-Sadr, is that "health care services are less likely to be available."
That said, El-Sadr notes that this kind of population shift can be a good strategy in an area where transmission within a community has not yet occurred but is deemed likely. This could be a "way that people can have more of an ability to survive, to make a living, get social support [if they are sick], get more access to food, where they can socially distance more readily."
Problem: Social distancing is hard to enforce in densely populated low-income countries.
Solution: Many governments around the world have turned to the police to ensure that people stay home and hand out punishments to those who aren't following the lockdown rules. In India, for example, people who violate the lockdown could face up to a year in prison. Others in the country have faced unusual punishments, such as writing "I am very sorry" 500 times, according to an NPR report.
Assessment: Unfortunately, there have been reports of officers using physical violence to keep people in their homes in several countries, including India, Bangladesh and the Philippines. In Kenya, the violence has resulted in public outcry, with citizens calling for more civility from its police force. "This is no way to fight a coronavirus epidemic," tweeted a Kenya-based journalist.
Problem: More supplies to fight COVID-19 are needed.
Solution: Get factories to switch gears and respond to the coronavirus.Kenya's textile industry has pivoted to making masks and protective equipment. The Kitui County Textile Center (KICOTEC) has shifted from sewing chef's whites and school uniforms to turning out face masks and scrubs for healthcare workers. Kenya's state-owned oil company is now making hand sanitizer, which it says it is distributing for free.
In South Africa, the state-owned missile manufacturer Denel, has been working to design and build ventilators, and to convert armored trucks into ambulances. The government has launched an initiative called the National Ventilator Project, which calls for companies to build 10,000 ventilators by the end of June, using locally available parts and materials.
Similar efforts are underway in Nigeria, where the government announced that they're working with car companies to manufacture locally-made ventilators.
Assessment:
In Kenya, KICOTEC turning out 30,000 surgical masks a day, according to Kenya's Ministry of Health. Kenya's petroleum company has produced more than 80,000 gallons so far, and plans to make at least 600,000 gallons more.
But WHO projects that countries will need millions of masks, goggles and other supplies to protect healthcare workers and citizens while mounting a response to COVID-19.
So local manufacturing can only partly fill the gap. But local authorities believe it is critical: "We're trying to build up local capacity to ensure that the critical facilities, the beds and ventilators, respirators could be made available within the country," says Adaeze Oreh, a senior official in Nigeria's Ministry of Health, "So we're not constrained by international travel restrictions, border closures and relying on imports."
Problem: Public health officials globally stress the importance of frequent hand-washing in the fight against COVID-19. In low- and middle-income countries, however, 35% of people lack regular access to soap and water, according to WHO.
"The health workers say we must wash our hands," said Zukwisa Qezo, a 47-year-old mother of two who lives in the Cape Town township to NPR. "But with what?! The city must bring us soap."
Solution: To improve the ability for people to clean their hands, WHO advises that hand hygiene stations either with soap and water or with alcohol-based hand sanitizer to be placed at the entrances of buildings, and in transport hubs such as bus and train stations. The system can be as simple as two buckets one filled with chlorinated water, and one to catch the wastewater.
Assessment: Public hand-washing stations, which were effective in the fight against Ebola, are being resurrected in countries such as Liberia and Sierra Leone, NPR reports. Doctors Without Borders reports that their volunteers are setting up hand washing points in many of the settings they operate in, including migrant camps in Nigeria and health facilities in Mozambique.
At a news conference, New Zealand reported one new case, four "probable cases" and one new death.
Ashley Bloomfield, New Zealand's Director General of Health, said the low number "does give us confidence that we've achieved our goal of elimination, which -- that never meant zero but it does mean we know where our cases are coming from."
He added: "Our goal is elimination. And again, that doesn't mean eradication but it means we get down to a small number of cases so that we are able to stamp out any cases and any outbreak that might come out."
New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said the coronavirus was "currently" eliminated but that the country needed to remain alert and could still expect to continue to see new cases.
"So as we have said elimination means we may well reach zero but we may well then have small numbers of cases coming up again, that doesn't mean we have failed, it just means that we are in the position to have that zero tolerance approach to have a very aggressive management of those cases and keep those numbers low and fading out again," she said.
Ardern said that in the past few days, cases had been in the single digits, calling the numbers "incredible" while sending her sympathies to those who had lost loved-ones during the pandemic.
She praised the efforts of New Zealanders, saying: "It's been nearly 5 weeks living and working in ways that just two months ago would have been impossible. But we did. And we have done it together."
New Zealand currently restricts most travelers from coming into the country, except its citizens and permanent residents.
The "level three" alert that goes into effect at the start of Tuesday will allow businesses to partially reopen with some restrictions, including requiring physical distancing of two meters outside of home.
Schools are to reopen with limited capacity, people are encouraged to work from home unless that is not possible and low-risk local recreation activities are allowed. Public venues such as libraries, museums, gyms are still going to remain closed. The measures will be reassessed in two weeks on May 11.
According to Johns Hopkins University, New Zealand has a total of 1,469 confirmed novel coronavirus cases and 19 deaths.
Prema Thakur, an official for the Champawat district in India, teaches Pratap Singh Bora, a 56-year-old migrant laborer from Nepal, how to write his name in Hindi. Sanju Chand hide caption
Prema Thakur, an official for the Champawat district in India, teaches Pratap Singh Bora, a 56-year-old migrant laborer from Nepal, how to write his name in Hindi.
All his life, 56-year-old Pratap Singh Bora has been sticking his thumb in ink to sign documents. He didn't go to school when he was a kid. Little did he know that he would learn to write his first words at a coronavirus lockdown center during a global pandemic.
Bora is a construction laborer working in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand. He was returning to his native Nepal in late March when India announced a three-week coronavirus lockdown (the lockdown has since been extended to May 3). The government shut off public transport and sealed borders. Like tens of millions of migrant laborers across India, Bora was stuck.
On April 10, Indian authorities housed Bora and dozens of other stranded migrants in a school converted into a relief camp in the town of Tanakpur along the India-Nepal border. India has set up more than 20,000 camps across the country to provide food and shelter to poor people affected by the lockdown.
But at the Tanakpur relief camp, residents get something extra: an opportunity to learn.
It's one of 10 centers in Uttarakhand's Champawat district where authorities are running literacy programs for illiterate migrant workers. About 200 inhabitants are learning to read and write for the first time, says Ramesh Chandra Purohit, chief education officer for Champawat district.
"We wanted the laborers to get something out of the lockdown and not just kill time," says Purohit.
Purohit explains that Champawat sits on the Indo-Nepal border and sees a huge influx of poor, illiterate laborers. Bora was one of them. He came to India nearly two decades ago to find work and usually goes back home twice a year to visit his family.
When the relief camp organizers first tried to get him enrolled in the literacy program a few weeks ago, Bora was hesitant.
Illiterate migrant laborers in lockdown learn to read and write. Sanju Chand hide caption
"He was embarrassed that he was the oldest of all the students in the class," says municipal official Prema Thakur who teaches the laborers. Most of the students are in their thirties, says Thakur. "He used to say, 'what am I going to do learning to read and write at this age?'" says Thakur.
But Thakur and her colleagues motivated him. They brought notebooks and pencils for their students. And after just two days of classes, Bora was able to write his name in Hindi, Thakur says. In fact, he learned faster than many of his younger classmates, including his 30-year-old son, Thakur adds.
"It felt really nice [when I wrote my name]," Bora says. "When I was a kid, we used to live in a hilly area and there was no school nearby."
Bora says his family was also too poor to send him to school.
"We feel like kids again when our class begins and the teacher comes," says 26-year-old Navidad, who's also staying at the Tanakpur facility. "We feel like we're in school."
Navidad, who goes by one name, learned to read and write when he was a kid but dropped out in middle school. Now, he's helping his lockdown classmates with their homework.
"The teacher tells others to come to me if they have any doubts after class," Navidad says.
In addition to literacy programs, the relief camp also has yoga classes and an initiative to help the migrant workers quit tobacco, says Purohit. The camp organizers screen movies and encourage those who are literate to read magazines and newspapers that they provide. In the evenings they play a popular Indian singing game called antakshari, in which participants have to sing a song that starts with the syllable that their competitor's song ended with.
That's different from how laborers stranded in some other parts of the country are coping with the lockdown.
In India's financial capital Mumbai, hundreds of migrant workers defied curfew earlier this month and thronged a railway station. They were demanding that the government allow them to go back to their villages. In the end, police used batons to disperse the crowd.
Purohit says entertainment activities conducted in their relief camps help avoid a similar situation by keeping the workers engaged.
Utilizing the lockdown time to teach migrant laborers how to read and write is a great idea, says Vachaspati Shukla, assistant professor at the Sardar Patel Institute of Economic and Social Research in Gujarat, India.
"If possible, it must be implemented wherever migrant laborers are staying [in camps]," Shukla told NPR in an email.
Shukla says laborers mostly come from states that have very low adult literacy rates. India has more than one-third of the world's illiterate adults.
Literacy programs for adults in temporary settings like relief camps are not new. Refugee camps have had similar programs for years. But conducting reading and writing classes in facilities for people stranded due to the coronavirus is a novel idea. Such shelters in many parts of India lack basic sanitation let alone learning opportunities for their inhabitants.
Purohit says he and his colleagues are planning to conduct a short examination at the end of the lockdown for the laborers who've learned to read and write. Those who pass will be awarded a certificate as a sign of their achievement. He hopes they will continue to study after they leave.
Thakur, the teacher, says she's observed personal growth in all of her students. She's now teaching them numbers and the English alphabet. One 19-year-old has already filled his notebook, she says.
As for Bora, Thakur says, he's become enthusiastic. And not just about studying but also in activities like singing and dancing.
"It's like the inner child in him is awake again," Thakur says.
As the death toll due to coronavirus continues to increase, one certainty has emerged: the world was ill-equipped to deal with a catastrophe of this nature. However, this pandemic has provided individuals and communities across the globe a new found appreciation for the intricacies of disaster management.
One such aspect that has gained tremendous respect due to the pandemic is efforts by larger organizations such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and The World Health Organization, both of which have been crucial in collating and controlling the information related to the spread and management of the disease. The CDC has established a live data tracker that reports the number of cases and deaths in the United States, sorted by region and state so that communities can better ascertain and track the progress of the disease. This is in addition to the numerous other resources the organization is providing, including information on determining symptoms, general health tips, and forecasting services with regards to spread. In a similar effort,the now famous COVID-19 Dashboard by Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine has become one of the gold standards for monitoring real time data about the disease worldwide. It provides valuable information including disease trends, testing capacity, and cumulative confirmed cases across the globe. In the fight to stop the spread of the virus, resources like these that provide up-to-date, real time models of mortality and spread have been invaluable. Other large organizations have focused their efforts on the ground, especially those by healthcare systems. Some hospitals have transformed entire buildings and campuses into COVID care centers, especially in virus epicenters such as New York, which now has a death toll of nearly 17,000 people.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK - APRIL 25: Times Square is seen nearly empty during the coronavirus pandemic on ... [+] April 25, 2020 in New York City. COVID-19 has spread to most countries around the world, claiming over 200,000 lives with infections close to 2.9 million people. (Photo by Justin Heiman/Getty Images)
Indeed, only during these crises do people truly understand the value and scope of disaster management infrastructure. This was especially highlighted in the aftermath of the catastrophe created by Hurricane Katrina, which claimed nearly 1,800 lives and decimated the Gulf Coast. Though the response to Katrina elicited significant controversy, federal agencies, academics, and communities still look at that event as an unfortunate yet significant case study to learn from and improve disaster management practices. The coronavirus pandemic will likely be studied in the same manner in decades to come.
In an uncannily accurate note written by Bill Gates in 2015, he expressed what was then received as a controversial thought: the world is simply not prepared to deal with a diseasean especially virulent flu, for examplethat infects large numbers of people very quickly. Of all the things that could kill 10 million people or more, by far the most likely is an epidemic. But I believe we can prevent such a catastrophe by building a global warning and response system for epidemics. It would apply the kind of planning that goes into national defensesystems for recruiting, training, and equipping health workers; investments in new tools; etc.to the effort to prevent and contain outbreaks.
APRIL 18: In this screengrab, (L-R) Melinda Gates and Bill Gates speak during "One World: Together ... [+] At Home" presented by Global Citizen on April, 18, 2020. The global broadcast and digital special was held to support frontline healthcare workers and the COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund for the World Health Organization, powered by the UN Foundation. (Photo by Getty Images/Getty Images for Global Citizen )
This coherently summarizes the disruption that will need to occur due to COVID-19. The world must and will start paying attention to critical infrastructure that communities require factors such as increasing access to equitable housing, creating models to alleviate food and resource poverty, and making available preventative and acute healthcare services. This pandemic will also shed light to the importance of investing in evidence based medical research, promoting vaccinations for preventable diseases, and developing disease containment and mitigation strategies. More resources and support must also be given to organizations that are invested in training healthcare professionals to specifically address such disasters, such as the American College of Emergency Physicians, which recognizes specific disaster management fellowship programs. These are the resources and professionals that are ultimately first-in-line for disaster response, and it is high time that the world recognizes their value.
Indeed, the global response against COVID-19 has mobilized large-scaled organizations, multidisciplinary professionals, and individuals from all sectors of society in mounting a response against this unprecedented catastrophe. This united front has been providing much needed healthcare, financial, housing, and life-sustaining needs to those that most require it. However, the common factor among all of these organizations and respondents: no one was ready for a global crisis of this scale. Therefore, the unfortunate effects of coronavirus must inspire and empower change in a useful way that helps the world prepare for future iterations of similar disasters. The one thing that is certain about pandemics, viruses, disasters, and conflict is that they will inevitably repeat. What is modifiable however, is how societies learn from them and mount their next response.
New Jersey is still a number of weeks away from starting to reopen from the near lockdown restrictions to slow the spread the coronavirus, Gov. Phil Murphy said Sunday morning.
Murphy also said he is still deciding whether the state will reopen as a whole or whether it could be a regional approach.
New Jersey has suffered an extraordinary toll and loss of life," Murphy said while appearing on NBCs Meet the Press Sunday, after the shows host noted the death toll from COVID-19 has surpassed the combined total number of people in the state who died fighting in Vietnam, the Korea War and World War I.
The fatalities continue to be significant each and every day," the governor said.
Murphy, who has said he plans to unveil a broad blueprint to reopen the state on Monday, said more time is needed for people to stay at home and adhere to his strict orders to mitigate the spread of the virus. He has kept those predictions vague, and recently said it would be several more weeks before restrictions would be rolled back.
CORONAVIRUS RESOURCES: Live map tracker | Newsletter | Homepage
I think best the best understanding of the data right now is that we are still a number of weeks away, he said. Were not of the woods yet. The mandate to stay at home and stay away from each other is still very much in effect until we can break the back of this curve.
Asked whether people could expect the state to reopen on a regional basis, Murphy responded: While we havent made a decision on that, were going to move as one state, recognizing youve got density issues in the north that you just dont have in the south."
The coronavirus outbreak in New Jersey increased Saturday to at least 105,523 total cases, with 5,863 deaths, as state officials announced 3,457 new positive tests and 249 additional fatalities attributed to COVID-19.
New Jersey the U.S. state with the second-most coronavirus cases and related deaths has been under broad lockdown orders for more than a month. On March 21, Murphy ordered residents to stay home, except for exercise and necessary travel, banned social gatherings, and closed schools and nonessential businesses. That includes golf courses.
Another update is scheduled for midday Sunday.
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Matt Arco may be reached at marco@njadvancemedia.com.
"It feels like Katrina and the Katrina recovery mashed into one," said New Orleans City Councilman Jason Williams. "The streets are eerily quiet. You see people walking, but it's not the vibrant city we're all used to."
On a recent Friday night, the most exciting scene on Bourbon Street was watching Jarvis Davis work the corner, drumming up business for one of the few restaurants still selling take-out dinners. Davis, 62, has worked in the French Quarter since he was 8 years old. As a kid, he used to sneak out of his house to perform tap dancing shows for tips from tourists. Now, he's known as Mr. Bourbon.
These streets are home, and he's never seen it this quiet. The French Quarter rats have had the run of the usually energetic streets, which has been a source of comedy and disgust. Jarvis is undaunted, but he's alone out here hustling business.
"I'm talking to myself. Me, the rats and I. We're pretty much having a good time, a little conversation every night," Jarvis said with an infectious grin and laugh.
Music from the rooftops
Musicians are quarantined, and their music can only be heard through online performances or if you're lucky enough to walk past a discreet performance on a porch or balcony.
"It seems like we're preparing for a storm, but the storm is already here," Andrews told CNN as he was picking up food for his mother.
Andrews spends almost eight hours a day alone in his Uptown New Orleans recording studio playing his horns and trying to create musical arrangements he can share with fans over social media. Inside the studio, he's able to forget about the pandemic, he says.
It's these brass bands that offer so much comfort in times of tragedy in these cities. The musicians lead second line funeral processions. That isn't happening right now, and that makes Andrews worried that people aren't dealing with loss and death properly.
"We're used to a certain closure. We're used to sending the bodies off," said Andrews.
Andrews wants to sit on the rooftop of his studio and play the trombone so everyone around can hear it. He talked of using a drone to capture the moment so he could share that as well, but mostly he wants people to hear it live, as far as the sound would travel.
He says he hopes the music will remind his hometown that a storm knocked this city down before it got right back up.
"It took a long road to get back from rebuilding, but the heart and soul of the city made us even stronger to want to be back," Andrews said. "We're up for the fight to do whatever we have to do to defeat this thing."
'Front line' inspiration
Artist Terrance Osborne has spent the coronavirus quarantine with his family in their home on the West Bank of the Mississippi River. Osborne created some of the most recognized artwork in the aftermath of Katrina. Pieces titled "Post Katrina Blues" and "Evacuation Plan" and a series "Hurricane Solution" captured the sadness and absurdity with a whimsical vibrancy.
Osborne has watched New Orleans turn into a "ghost town" in the last month. He says what strikes him most is that people take walks and don't even look at each other. It's as if they're worried that sparking a conversation will draw someone in close. It goes against every fiber of their being. It's crazy, like the words, "How you doin' baby?" might end up exposing you to the coronavirus.
"It's like the city's asleep," said Osborne from his front porch. "We embrace, we love. We share. We talk. So, it's tough."
Osborne decided to spend the time he's sheltering at home creating a piece of art that he hopes becomes the iconic image of New Orleans' fight against the coronavirus.
In just a week, Osborne created a painting he called "Front Line," inspired by the iconic World War II Rosie the Riveter campaign posters. Osborne is donating 1,000 of the prints to hospital staff across New Orleans.
The painting shows an African American nurse with a steely and courageous gaze that Osborne says symbolizes the courage of frontline hospital workers. And the Band-Aid near the front-line tattoo is a reminder that workers like her are just as vulnerable to the disease but keep showing up to work every day.
Katrina inspired musicians and artists in ways that took time to develop. It's the creative spirit that helps lift the city from its darkest moment, and Osborne thinks the same is very likely happening right now across the city.
"We have to be spirited and eccentric and lively. That's part of our culture, so we're gonna recover from it," said Osborne.
Snapshots of life
New Orleans still finds a way to remind you it's unlike most other cities in America. It's a story best told through individual snapshots of moments you witness at a passing glance.
The two women wearing their Sunday dresses with colorful spring hats sitting in the front yard in front of signs that read, "You Honk. We Drink." Sure enough, a car honked, and they drank.
The Catholic priest listening to a parishioner's confession in the church parking lot.
The owner of the Golden Shears barber shop who left a sign in the window promising customers he "will be here to fix everyone's ridiculous hair once this is over."
The sound of New Orleans' iconic street trolleys still rumbling down St. Charles Avenue.
One trumpet player stood on a corner on Royal Street in the French Quarter playing a few tunes.
The City Park flowers were blooming, and many people were walking around trying to keep as much distance as possible.
New Orleans survived Katrina and that makes its people feel like it can defeat anything.
"This is sad," Mr. Bourbon said as a few cars slowly passed by. "We gonna come back. We come back from everything. That's New Orleans. Stay strong, stay firm and be for real and come back and do what you been doing."
A view of Canal Street with boarded up windows during the coronavirus pandemic on April 12, 2020 in New York City.
Noam Galai | Getty Images
Plunges in employment, manufacturing and other widely followed data points only tell part of the story behind the coronavirus-induced economic damage. What they don't readily reflect is where the worst of it will fall, and that's likely to be on the people who can handle it least.
Lower-income groups, who depend on the service industry for jobs, are taking the biggest impact from the shutdown of an economy that is driven by services like hotels, bars and restaurants. They work in the hard-hit retail sector and are dependent on others being able to shop and dine and travel, activities which all have been sharply curtailed during the current shutdown.
While government programs have been focused on keeping people afloat who have been displaced by the efforts to curtail the coronavirus spread, the pain is likely to be long lasting.
"The largest body blows are to the travel industry, the retail industry, parts of the health care industry that are on the front lines battling the virus. Those are generally low-paying jobs, so the folks in the bottom part of the income wealth distribution are going to get creamed by this," said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics. "There's no doubt about it."
Economists at the St. Louis Federal Reserve have been tracking the impact from the current shutdown and see the biggest hit to the bottom fifth of earners.
In a paper released a few days ago, they projected final demand in food, leisure and hospitality to drop by 75%. In all, they project consumer spending to fall an average of 3% but consumption to slide by 5% in the bottom income rung. That tells some of the story about the consumer impact, but "perhaps more important, these consumption declines are deeply unequal hitting those living in areas of highest financial distress the hardest," the economists said.
The situation is going to be exacerbated, the research found, because the initial spread of coronavirus cases happened in regions with lower levels of economic stress previously, but now is spreading to higher stress regions.
Consequently, when the economy starts to recover, the areas that benefit likely will be those driven by financial services, like New York, while the more hospitality and tourism focused regions could languish.
"Those other service industries just aren't going to participate, and that's one reason to expect that any kind of recovery will be very, very weak," Zandi said. "It's going to be a slog. We're going to get a bounce when businesses start to reopen, but on the other side of that I think we're in economic quicksand for a while."
Indeed, there's overwhelming evidence that the U.S. is in its deepest trough since the Great Depression, and the biggest hit from the 26 million Americans who have filed for unemployment benefits has come to those working in hotels, bars and restaurants.
There's less consensus, though, on what the recovery will look like, with projections ranging from a U, V, W, or even a "Nike swoosh."
The worst-case outcome is that even if the government starts lifting restrictions, people still will be too afraid to resume their normal levels, and that in turn will steepen the recession.
But there's another scenario that seems at least plausible, where any meaningful resumption of activity will be seen as a positive and those who are suffering at the bottom end of the scale will get at least a boost if not a full-scale thrust back into a normal life.
"We're definitely going to have a 'V' off the bottom. To me, there's not much debate about that," said Jim Paulsen, chief investment strategist at the Leuthold Group. "When you go down as much as we've gone down, any bounce is going to feel like a 'V' initially. It may warp back into slower growth again fairly soon, but I think for a few quarters we have a 'V.'"
That bounce, he said, could be felt especially in hospitality businesses.
"If your restaurant is 100% shut down and by the end of the year, it's 50% shut down, that's still a heck of an increase," Paulsen said.
The degree to which those businesses are brought back will depend on multiple factors. Containing the virus, obviously is critical. Also, the success of areas that have begun reopening, such as the state of Georgia and Las Vegas, also will be influential.
The past week brought some somewhat surprising news about the virus's progress.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo estimated that 14% of all state residents and 20% of New York City residents have been infected with Covid-19. Those numbers indicate two important things: that the disease is both far more widespread than previously thought as well as considerably less lethal, with New York mortality rates around 0.6% and hospitalization rates around 2%, according to Tom Lee, head of research at Fundstrat Global Advisors.
"A perspective -- imagine if policy makers knew hospitalization 2% and mortality 0.6% vs original belief of 20% and 5%-10%," Lee said in a note in which he said it's becoming clearer that treatment is most important for coronavirus cases, followed by testing and then by developing a vaccine.
"As a side note, it could have changed how policy makers would have reacted -- instead of shutting down the economy, the US might have only shut down NYC (for instance)," he wrote.
Lee said the 3% hit to consumer expenditures might not seem as daunting.
"In other words, once the economy is re-started, the 'hole' that will need to be filled by that potential 33% drop is $240 billion, which is not a deep a hole as one imagined a month ago," he said.
Rw / RW/MediaPunch/IPx
The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon suspends production due to the Coronavirus crisis on March 16.
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In just a matter of weeks, the coronavirus pandemic shut down all of Hollywood, bringing more than 70 television productions to a complete halt. There are fears about COVID-19 spreading in a close-knit working environment like television sets where theres abundant human contact and endless transferring of germs, even at the cost of billions of dollars and countless production jobs.
The mandated quarantine has prevented the majority of TV shows from continuing to shoot, pushing back release dates and leaving people concerned about the future of the industry, but some producers jumped into brainstorming creative solutions to create their shows. The transition to virtual television production is still evolving as the world continues to grapple with an uncertain timeline of how long people will be in quarantine because of COVID-19.
BuzzFeed News spoke to producers on popular TV shows about how theyre working behind the scenes to stay in production, make sure the content well doesnt run dry, and keep their networks in business.
Khlo Kardashian and Scott Disick were scheduled to film for an episode of Keeping Up With the Kardashians 18th season on March 16, but once the mandatory quarantine hit, executive producer Farnaz Farjam hopped on the phone with Kris Jenner and the two decided it wasnt worth the risk to continue shooting with family members together in one place.
I'm very confident and excited for people to see these episodes of Keeping Up during quarantine because they're actually super charming and they're super fun, Farjam, whos worked on the reality series since its inception in 2007, told BuzzFeed News. They feel even more intimate, if that's possible because we're so intimate with them anyway.
On Tuesday, March 17, iPhones were delivered to each family member so they could each continue filming on their own. Initially, they experimented with uploading their raw footage to a Google Drive and sharing what theyd been up to, but then producers decided to have runners pick up the iPhones directly from the family members houses once a week so that the footage would be as high resolution as possible.
Farjam said she had no concerns about the quality of content coming from Kim, Khlo, Kris, and Kylie since theyre already been producers on the show and are experienced in curating their own content. Not every reality star or celebrity could pull off filming by themselves without a lot of direction or assistance from producers or crew members, but if anyone could do it, its the Kardashian/Jenner family.
I also work with development and we've tried to task certain people with self-shooting some stuff for us so that we could keep working towards things, and it's just not the same, Farnaz said. People just don't have the same skill sets as this family.
They even briefly debated giving the cast professional filming cameras, but
in a time like this, there isnt a lot of room for error without the technical expertise. They ultimately decided that iPhone cameras yielded high enough quality videos and it would be easier for the family to use a tool theyre already familiar with.
I mean, honestly, I think Kim, Khlo, and Kris, and even Kylie, and even Kendall and Scott, I think everybody has been really having fun with it. Theyre already kind of producers and EPs and they know what's fun anyway, so they're just kind of owning it and they're running with it, she said.
On a recent episode of the shows current season, Kourtney Kardashian announced shes taking a break from filming after 13 years of being on camera. But when asked if Kourtney was participating in the quarantine shoots, Farnaz said Kourtneys involved.
She sends us some videos, she added. I just think that with Kim, Khlo, Kris, and Kylie, there's just some of them that like to do it more and are better at it.
After watching some of the footage, Farnaz said the production crew realized theyd need to conduct professional-looking interviews to ask the women questions and enhance the episodes like they normally do. They sent their director of photography and someone in charge of lighting to set up interview rooms at the houses. Both crew members, who Farnaz said stayed super safe during the quarantine, wore hazmat-like gear full painters suits and masks when entering each home. They sanitized all of the equipment, and the families were instructed not to enter the rooms for the following 24 hours. They also left directions on the equipment about which buttons to press and how to use the cameras while producers asked interview questions over videoconferencing. Kim even posted a behind-the-scenes video of the setup in an Instagram story.
The episode about the quarantine which will include all of this collected footage is supposed to air sometime at the end of the current season.
I think this is going to be such a big part of people's lives and the Kardashians are going through it like everyone else, Farnaz said. I think people will be curious to see what they did during the quarantine, so why not continue to capture it so that you can share it with the fans?
The Tonight Show crew filmed the shows last episode in their New York City studio on March 12 without an audience before shutting down for the foreseeable future. Everyone took the weekend to regroup, some of them relocating outside of the city, but according to producer Jamie Granet-Bederman, host Jimmy Fallon didnt want to waste any time getting back onscreen in whatever capacity he could. A team of staffers met virtually on Monday to plan for a show the following day and with the help of Nancy Juvonen Fallons wife whos also an experienced producer and co-owns the production company Flower Films with Drew Barrymore The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon: At Home Edition premiered its first installment that Tuesday
Jimmy said he felt like he needed to do something. He was like, I don't feel right being off the air, Granet-Bederman told BuzzFeed News.
Fallon and Juvonen filmed the entire show by themselves on their iPhones and using Zoom at their house in Long Island. The 10-minute segments have continued to run on YouTube with NBC then airing the videos along with rerun material. Similarly to the Keeping Up With the Kardashians team, the Tonight Show producers felt Fallon was well-equipped to continue filming from home because of his range of skills beyond his role in front of the camera.
At heart, he's a writer, he's a producer, and he could do a one-man show obviously, he's doing it now, Granet-Bederman said.
Fallon and Juvonens daughters, 6-year-old Winnie and 5-year-old Frannie, have also regularly made appearances on the show. They have played musical introductions, have handwritten title cards, and are Fallons audience when hes reading his monologue. The kids were an organic addition to Fallons show, according to Granet-Bederman, and werent a part of any production plan.
Its just whats happening right now. In my house, my son pops up in the back of my Zoom calls. If you have children at home with you, you can't not have your kids a part of everything, she said. And Jimmy and his wife are just like us. He's in a house and his kids are there and now he's dealing with homeschooling, but before homeschooling started the kids had nothing to do. So he can't be like, Sorry, girls, Daddy's going to work and Mommy's helping me too and not include them. They were there filming all this stuff and the girls are young enough that they don't really understand.
By the time the second episode aired, Fallon was already interviewing his first virtual guest, Lin Manuel-Miranda, on Zoom, the videoconferencing app on which he also interviewed Kerry Washington, Melissa McCarthy, John Legend, Justin Timberlake, Kim Kardashian West, and even Joe Biden, while also raising money for coronavirus relief.
The first week it was a little bit more ragtag. It was definitely more like, wait, what are we doing here? Granet-Bederman said. Now we've looped in some more production people so it's definitely a lot better planned. We have real rundowns and more meetings that actually make sense. We have planning meetings, but at the end of the day, it is still Jimmy and an iPhone and his wife and him doing interviews on Zoom. Like, there's only so much the support staff can do when it's just him at the house doing it.
While production staff arent clear how long theyll have to adapt to this new way of filming The Tonight Show, Granet-Bederman said Fallons presence and the At Home Edition version of the show is bringing joy to peoples screens. In a world of uncertainty, the show is giving viewers something they can rely on.
There's so much bad and there's so much grim news everywhere you turn. It's important to know the facts and to learn about it, but there's only so much you can take, and Jimmy's providing a little bit of normalcy, Granet-Bederman said. That's the feedback I've gotten, that people really love that Jimmy's providing normalcy and he's also being realistic about what's going on in the world. We think, What can we do to help bring a smile to people's faces? Because that's what entertainment does.
Desus & Mero interviewing Joe Biden
Showtimes Desus & Mero is another late-night show that filmed its last episode without an audience on March 12 before taking a two-week hiatus to figure out its next steps. After producers and the hosts brainstormed what a virtual version of the show would look like, producer and writer Josh Gondelman said the team began hopping on regularly scheduled Zoom meetings to prep for their first at-home show, which aired on March 30.
It's a weird and scary time globally, but it is very satisfying to work on the show right now and I'm very grateful to be a part of this ongoing thing that I'm really proud of, Gondelman told BuzzFeed News.
According to Gondelman, a runner dropped off equipment to Desus and Meros homes, leaving it on their doorsteps in order to stay safe and follow the rules of quarantine.
They are each a one-man crew, making sure their lighting is set up, someone walks them through the audio, and someone is directing episodes from Zoom, he said. Desus is in the Bronx and Mero is in New Jersey, so it's a real long-distance intimacy to make the show feel like the fast, quick, intimate show that it is. It takes people all over the place and literally no one is in the same room.
Gondelman said theyre able to use their whole staff remotely, from producers and writers to the graphic department. The logistics of how to keep the show running from a distance has been challenging, he said, but their team jumped into problem-solving mode and has continued to adapt.
Our postproduction team has been so amazing working with the technology needed to make this happen, and our showrunner has been so amazing, figuring out how to keep this staff in communication with each other and figuring out a workflow where every person is in a different office with different Wi-Fi set up in seven different boroughs of New York and even with people in New Jersey, Gondelman said. It was a real logistical challenge.
In this new world of virtual TV production, Desus & Mero airs episodes weekly on Showtime and releases clips on YouTube, featuring interviews with Anthony Fauci, Tracee Ellis Ross, Mark Cuban, and Alicia Keys. They even snagged an interview with Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, using Zoom to put it all together.
Gondelman said the production team is happy to move forward with the show virtually, giving people content at a time when they need it.
We wanted to do things as safely as possible and still make this show happen, and I think we've been able to do that which is really exciting and stabilizing for me, personally, he said.
It's a very scary and anxious time and its nice to have this routine. So many people are out of work and there are so many question marks amidst the public health worries, but then everyone's life has to keep going, and so I'm just overwhelmingly grateful for being able to participate in this.
Samantha Bee hosting Full Frontal With Samantha Bee
When it was reported March 11 that two CBS News employees had tested positive for the coronavirus and both of their buildings were affected, Full Frontal With Samantha Bee which films in one of the buildings immediately shut down production. Staff members took one week off before getting back to work and adjusting to a new production model, leading to the first virtual episode on March 25.
Late-night host Samantha Bee started filming episodes from the backyard of her Connecticut home with the help of her husband, Jason Jones, whos also a producer and actor. The two are using Zoom to prep with other members of the production team and an iPhone to virtually film the TBS show.
Sam wanted to make sure to have a show and we tried to get back on air as quickly as possible, producer Razan Ghalayini told BuzzFeed News.
Ghalayini called the experience a crash course in learning how to do this and think creatively, saying that the shows IT department has been instrumental in helping producers and talent set up their Zoom and other technology and capture footage at a high enough resolution that editors can work with.
Theyre the people making sure you get your shot and they're the people who are downloading the media with you, Ghalayini said. Everyone would be lost without them.
The team also collaborates in Google Docs, writing scripts for final versions of the videos and making changes in real time.
Zoom has also been useful when interviewing talent from the comfort of their own homes. On April 15, Full Frontal aired an interview with former presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren, another virtual feat.
After we booked her on the show, we sent her team a Zoom invite and then collaborated with one of her staffers to test the audio and make sure all of her settings were set up. We did the same thing with Sam. And then basically we all got on to the Zoom call at the same time, Ghalayini said.
The show, which is currently in its fifth season on TBS, is prepared to keep filming from home into the future, according to Ghalayini, no matter how creative they need to get.
Sam is driving and piloting her own show so that we can all practice social distancing in a seamless way, Ghalayini said. I think if someone was able to be there and help her it would be a lot easier, but a lot of it is falling on her shoulders. She is the superhero of this.
American Idol producers working on the remote show.
When threats of COVID-19 suspended production on the 18th season of American Idol, the show had already narrowed down its contestants to their top 20 performers. On March 17, the show announced production had been working remotely since the previous week and was evaluating how to move forward. Showrunner and executive producer Trish Kinane told BuzzFeed News there was a debate: Should they postpone the season until contestants could compete with each other in person, or could American Idol pull off a version of a technologically adjusted version of the show?
It became clear that if we did postpone, we weren't quite sure when we could come back because the virus was developing in a way that nobody could predict what was going to happen, Kinane said.
And they didnt want to stop the momentum of the strong ratings, interaction with viewers, and the hopes of the contestants who had already worked hard to get to this point on the show.
I think none of us wanted to make the show under the circumstances, but its proved challenging, exciting, and actually its bringing out different things, Kinane said. So were embracing it.
With the decision to go ahead with the live shows, which will air on Sunday nights starting April 26, came a lot of technical preparation. Kinane said in the last five to six weeks, the producers were on a mission to execute a remote live show with all of the characteristics that are American Idol. The executive producer said they were up for the challenge because the show has a history of integrating new technology into the series, ever since American Idol encouraged viewers to text in their votes.
Executive producer Megan Michaels Wolflick told BuzzFeed News its been inspiring and reassuring to watch late-night TV shows like The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel Live! continue to air episodes during the pandemic, but their competition show is an entirely different format.
This is a cohesive show, Wolflick said. We have a rundown, the way the acts are broken out, and its almost identical to what we do in the studio.
Wolflick said one of the most important components of pulling off the production was to make sure all 20 contestants had a level playing field, not only sounding their best, but having the same equipment across all of their remote locations. With everyone filming from their homes, production sent each contestant iPhones, tripods, lighting equipment, and high-quality microphones. They helped contestants set everything up over Zoom, which is also how theyve been directing the contestants filming and how they communicate during dress rehearsals and performances.
Producers even toyed with the idea of somehow incorporating a virtual audience, but ultimately nixed it because of logistical complications. Even though contestants wont continue to perform in front of large audiences like every other contestant on past seasons have, Wolflick said its just a different challenge for contestants who are still maintaining the same nerves and energy when they perform in front of the judges remotely.
They have been practicing for their American Idol moment their whole life in these spaces, so what would have been your living room stage since the age of 4 is now where you're performing for American Idol, Wolflick said. So they're comfortable, but they're also trying to get the best work done. Some of them are performing in front of their families, and when the lights come on and its time to perform, they amp it up just like we do in the studio. Its funny how that energy can transfer.
Most importantly, Kinane said, the technical setup allows for natural interactions with the contestants and judges can react immediately to each performance.
In order to be the next American Idol you've got to have a great voice, you've got to have talent. But you've also got to have resilience, hard work ethic, and charisma. There's a lot more that goes into having a hugely successful career than just having singing talent, Kinane said. This experience is really pushing them to show off those other skills and talents that they've got. I also think the judges would say, if you've got star quality, you've got it. It doesn't matter whether you're in your bedroom or on a stage at CBS Studios in Los Angeles. It will shine through.
Not only did the coronavirus shut down TV shows that were already filming, but scripted programs that were in preproduction have also been brought to a halt. The writers room for AMCs The Walking Dead had been in session for a few months when the quarantine forced everyone to stay out of the office and meet virtually over Zoom.
Consulting producer LaToya Morgan told BuzzFeed News the writers started working from home on March 13, and even though shed much rather be working with her team in person, shes grateful theyre all still able to come up with stories for the shows 11th season.
I think Zoom offers a great opportunity to check in with people visually. Seeing everyones faces, even if it is in those Brady Bunch boxes, you're like, Okay, you're safe. We're all going to get through this together, Morgan told BuzzFeed News. So it's reassuring in a sense.
Morgan said the writers room calls usually include about six to nine people and last between four and five hours. They take breaks throughout the day and are on the Zoom calls for less time than a normal day in their actual writers room, which Morgan said can make it feel even more focused because everyone has a certain block of time to get their work done.
Of course this is all disruptive in certain ways, but at the end of the day we're still able to do our jobs, Morgan said. We are tremendously fortunate and lucky that we're able to do that, and any burden or small technological glitches that we have really pale in comparison to the work that's being done by all our essential workers, our doctors, our nurses, our mail carriers. So we're able to endure.
The Walking Dead has maintained a rabid fanbase since it first premiered in 2010, and a lot of people are also turning to postapocalyptic films and TV shows in light of the coronavirus. Morgan said shes glad shows like The Walking Dead, even though its about a zombie-related pandemic, can give people comfort at a time like this.
I know it's odd for that to be something like a horror show, she said. But it's nice to be able to escape for a little while from the news.
Warner Brothers Studios halted film and TV production amid Coronavirus on April 8, in Los Angeles, California.
While some TV shows are virtually up and running and have shown that theyre capable of functioning with limited resources, unclear timelines about the coronavirus quarantine have left production crews who work in the field out of work and uncertain about the future of the industry. In a field of work that already lacks stability, with projects coming and going and crew members hopping from set to set, the coronavirus has left the state of television production especially in limbo.
We don't know how this is going to change the industry in general, because I do think when everything goes back to normal, whenever that is, it wont be the same exactly, a crew member on NBCs Chicago Fire who asked to remain anonymous told BuzzFeed News. No one knows what thats going to entail.
While crew members are out of jobs and scrambling to pay their bills, the public is relying on television and movies more than ever as a form of entertainment and distraction while in quarantine, a paradox that isnt lost on those same crew members. The Chicago Fire staff member expressed concern that those very workers responsible for creating TV shows on the ground arent being considered or prioritized.
Everyones cooped up at home watching shows and watching movies and Im like, Who do you think is making that content for you to not be bored? the crew member said. And yet I feel like our country is kind of ignoring gig and freelance workers, not just in television and movies, but also in music and theater. I think everyone in the arts is kind of getting left behind and not being thought of.
Unlike others in the entertainment industry, unemployed production crew members dont have the luxury of working from home, keeping their benefits, and maintaining job security.
Callie Moore, a camera assistant in Atlanta, was finishing up a job on Amazons upcoming series The Underground Railroad when the coronavirus cut production short by just a couple of days.
Its scary just to know that our coverage can go away in the blink of an eye, she said. And theres nothing you can do about it because youre not working, you're not making money, you're not working enough hours in order to cover yourself, then you're just floating.
In addition to all of the unpredictability about when production crew members can get back to work on sets, producers have more questions than answers about what this new era of television production will look like in a post-quarantine world.
The Tonight Show producer Jamie Granet-Bederman said she thinks there are some things that are better like this and obviously there are things that are worse.
To tell monologue jokes to no audience is obviously very hard, but the intimacy of the interviews have been a little bit more laid back and a bit more special. It's also a time when everyone's feeling very vulnerable, everyone's in their home, so theyre more comfortable, Granet-Bederman said. It'll be interesting to see what changes and what stays the same after all of this.
American Idol producers working on the remote show.
According to Farjam, the Keeping Up With the Kardashians producer, the way production has shifted during quarantine will be representative of a temporary moment in time instead of a permanent fixture in entertainment.
I think for now we are just making it work and it's going to be fascinating and fun to watch, but I still think it takes a team to make things the best that they could be, Farjam said. We were at such a trend, in my opinion, where everyone wanted more premium content. People wanted content to look shiny, glossy, and beautiful and use prime lenses and all this stuff. Then all of a sudden, it was like, everyone's going in quarantine and everyone's going to have to videoconference in and deal with whatever kind of quality you can get. But I do think once this time is over, people are gonna start craving the beauty and the premium and the style again.
Gondelman from Desus & Mero said this new way of working together remotely has been an exciting experiment in creativity against terrible circumstances and is a testament to the flexibility and talent of the people on our team. Virtual TV production is an effective temporary solution, the producer said, but he doesnt envision this process being permanent because of the simple fact that people miss working alongside other people.
Even though we're on calls with each other, everybody kind of misses being in a workplace together and getting to collaborate in person and just the little subtleties of talking with people in the same room, Gondelman said. Facial expressions don't always read on a 3X4 box and just the speed at which you can share ideas and build on other people's. I think people really do miss it.
Now that a smaller staff of television crews are developing new skill sets and being innovative about how to get their shows made, Ghalayini, the Full Frontal With Samantha Bee producer, said she thinks the industry might change in the sense that we're learning that you can make something with less.
Whatever those potential changes will be, however, remain unclear given the overall uncertainty of how long statewide shelter-in-place and quarantines will last.
I'm not sure if you can tell what will come in the future now, but I do think like you'll probably see some sort of new version of storytelling emerge from this, Ghalayini said. Because invariably what will happen is people will have to get creative in new ways, and I think when they learn new languages and develop new tools, they're not just going to put them away when we can all go outside again.
But we're still so early in this, we just figured out how to do Zoom, she added. What are we going to figure out in three weeks when we get bored with Zoom?
