As US deaths exceed 40,000, Trump escalates reckless back-to-work campaign

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/04/20/pers-a20.html






20 April 2020


On Sunday, the death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic crossed 40,000 in the United States, with nearly 20,000 deaths in the past week alone.


The pandemic has exposed the complete dysfunctionality of American society and its incapacity to provide the most basic necessities—medical care, protective equipment and even food—to its citizens.


The government did nothing to prepare for the pandemic, Trump downplayed the disease as a “hoax,” and the media ignored it for months. While thousands of heroic healthcare workers, forced to work in unsafe conditions, fell ill and died, banks and corporations received the largest bailouts in human history.


Images of mass graves in New York City and of bodies piled up in refrigerated trailers and stuffed into spare rooms at Sinai Grace Hospital in Detroit will never leave the consciousness of the health care workers who witnessed them or the working class as a whole.


All over the country, hundreds of thousands of people are grieving the loss of their friends and loved ones. With millions laid off, countless households are just days away from total penury, turning to overstretched food pantries.


Despite Trump’s narrative that the pandemic has been contained, the disease is spreading to new parts of the country, with every state reporting at least one death, as the disease rampages through nursing homes and prisons.


In the midst of this disaster, the Trump administration is single-mindedly focused on re-opening American businesses, despite the lack of measures necessary to contain the pandemic. The Trump administration’s overriding concern is to ensure that the pandemic does not interfere with the enrichment of Wall Street and the major corporations.


The White House has made clear it is calling for businesses to reopen under conditions in which the infrastructure to test all suspected cases, quarantine those infected, and trace their contacts does not exist.


This is despite the warning by the World Health Organization and leading epidemiologists that it is utterly irresponsible to reopen businesses under these conditions, which would only fuel a resurgence of the pandemic.


Trump’s demand for a return to work has been supported by substantial sections of the media. On Sunday, NBC’s evening news program led not with the massive death toll, but with far-right protests, some with just dozens of participants, demanding the reopening of businesses. The media ignored the role of far-right groups in calling the demonstrations, occupying state capitols bearing assault rifles and flying Confederate flags and swastikas.


While the broadcast news downplayed the numerous strikes, sick-outs, and protests by workers taking place around the country and the world against a return to work under unsafe conditions, they have framed the tiny right-wing protests as the legitimate expression of the popular will.


Trump’s proposal that businesses in substantial portions of the United States reopen by May 1, initially presented as an absurd pipe dream, has now become the baseline. Even Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer announced that her state, facing the highest COVID-19 case fatality rate in the country, would reopen businesses by the start of next month.





“Lockdown showdown” was the theme of ABC News’ Sunday talk show, which presented the prospect of reopening businesses as a conflict between those who, like Trump, advocate a “big bang” and those, like Utah Governor Gary Herbert, who say the process should be “more like a dial.”


Trump and dominant sections of the media frame the question of reopening the country as a choice between losing lives and mass impoverishment. But this dichotomy is false. It assumes the prerogatives of the capitalist system as given, in which the state extends unlimited resources to the financial and corporate elite, but cannot ensure the economic livelihoods of workers during a pandemic.


The demand for a premature return to work was accompanied with a massive intensification of US efforts to scapegoat China for the pandemic. As with the demand to reopen businesses, Trump has set the tone for the Democrats and the media. On Tuesday, Trump announced that the White House would end US funding for the World Health Organization in a statement falsely blaming China for the pandemic.


The next day, the Associated Press published an article entitled, “China didn’t warn public of likely pandemic for 6 key days,” bolstering Trump’s false claims that China is responsible for the pandemic. This narrative—referring to the week between January 14 and January 20—is contradicted by even the most cursory analysis of US media reports at the time, which makes clear that the progress of the disease was being widely and accurately reported in the international press by the first week of January.


The Democrats and their associated media outlets are seeking to beat Trump at his own game. In a front-page article on Sunday, the New York Times painted Trump as too eager to appease China. “Eager to continue trade talks, uneasy about further rattling the markets and hungry to protect his relationship with President Xi Jinping at a moment when the United States is relying on China’s manufacturers for lifesaving medical supplies, Mr. Trump has repeatedly muddied Republican efforts to fault China.”


Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden took up this theme, accusing Trump in a new campaign ad of leaving “America vulnerable and exposed to this pandemic” by putting “his trust in China’s leaders instead.”


On Tuesday, The Washington Post published an article seeking to legitimize, without evidence, a right-wing conspiracy theory, pushed for months by Trump’s fascistic former campaign manager Stephen Bannon, that COVID-19 was created in a Chinese laboratory. The Post fished the claims out of Bannon’s private sewer and laundered it for use on the Sunday talk-shows, where it was a major topic of discussion.


The class struggle never rests, and imperialism never relaxes its predatory aims. This is especially true in a crisis. While workers are making these sacrifices, the US government provided a $6 trillion bailout to Wall Street and major corporations. The policy of quantitative easing and ultra-low interest rates, in effect for over a decade before the pandemic, was intensified in response to it.


If the ruling class has its way, the society that emerges from the crisis will be characterized by an intensification of all the tendencies that prevailed before the pandemic—more inequality, more exploitation, more poverty and more war.


While the ruling class’s assertion of its interests in the crisis is more immediate and direct, that of the working class will be more powerful. All over the world, from Italy to California, workers are refusing to labor in unsafe conditions and fighting to oppose a premature return to work. The efforts of the oligarchs to utilize the crisis to expand their wealth at the expense of thousands upon thousands of lives will produce immense social unrest.


The pandemic has made clear the bankruptcy of the capitalist system. In their struggle against the Trump administration’s back-to-work campaign, workers must take up the fight for the socialist transformation of society.


Andre Damon

UK think tank urges pension cuts to pay for pandemic

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/04/20/pens-a20.html






By Margot Miller
20 April 2020

The coronavirus pandemic is being seized on by the ruling elite to implement long-cherished plans to further erode UK pensions—a foretaste of massive austerity to come.

A new report by the Social Market Foundation (SMF) urges the Conservative government to abandon the “triple-lock” mechanism, which afforded pensioners a measure of income protection.

The triple-lock guarantees that state pensions increase each year, either by 2.5 percent, the average growth in wages in Britain, or the percentage growth in prices measured by the consumer price increase—whichever is the highest. Following this measure, pensions rose 3.9 percent in April, shadowing the rise in wages.

Anticipating a deep slump precipitated by global lockdowns, rising unemployment and collapsing wages, the SMF suggests the government replace the triple-lock with a double-lock, eliminating any guarantee of a 2.5 percent annual pension increase.

The SMF is a “top 12” UK think tank. Favoured by former Conservative Prime Minister John Major, it was closely associated with the Blair Labour government’s privatisation of public services. Current board members and policy advisors include Labour MP Dame Margaret Hodge and Stephen Kinnock, along with Tory MPs Tom Tugendhat, Laura Farris and Liberal Democrat Baroness Susan Kramer.

Titled “Intergenerational Fairness in the Coronavirus Economy,” the report by SMF Research Director Scott Corfe is an argument for intergenerational warfare. Those of working age, he writes, “bore the brunt” of the 2008 financial crisis and are now shouldering the cost of the coronavirus pandemic—it is time for old people to “share the sacrifice.”

The current economic lockdown, he complains, is “aimed at saving the lives of those at greatest risk, a group that is largely (but not exclusively) made up of older people … As we emerge from the crisis, older generations must uphold their part of the contract by bearing a fair proportion of future tax rises and welfare reforms.”

Unsurprisingly, there is no suggestion that the obscene wealth of the financial oligarchy should be taxed or confiscated to meet urgent social needs. Instead, Corfe forecasts that “Austerity Round Two” is looming to pay for the £370 billion financial bailout in the government’s Emergency Coronavirus Bill—money overwhelmingly funnelled to the banks and financial markets.

The SMF dismisses hopes for a “V-shaped recovery” in favour of the sober outlook of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) that “the global economy will potentially suffer for years to come.” Corfe warns of “years of tax rises and spending cuts as we emerge from the crisis.”

Echoing US President Donald Trump’s arguments for a return to work and profit making, Corfe writes, “Some are starting to question whether the cure for coronavirus might be worse than the disease.”

In fact, according to the Office for National Statistics, 93 percent of the population support lockdown measures to contain the pandemic. But governments around the world are hellbent on enforcing a return to work despite the complete absence of mass testing, contact tracing, quarantining or the resources demanded by public health workers to treat the sick and dying.

Corfe writes, “It is deemed crass to put a price on life (or at least to talk about it – the reality is that health care is rationed all the time on the basis of cost and whether treatment is worth it in terms of the perceived ‘value’ of the ‘quality-adjusted life years’ it adds).”


The SMF’s macabre proposals are combined with lying claims that “We have come together as a nation to protect our elderly and vulnerable.” The cynicism is breath-taking. The toll of the Johnson government’s “herd immunity” policy is over 16,000 dead— the majority aged 65 years and 39 percent in the over-85 age group. Meanwhile, care homes for the aged have become killing fields.

In the midst of immense human suffering, the SMF argues that “Austerity Round Two” must be “shared”—starting with ending the triple lock on pensions, saving the treasury £200 billion over five years.

The UK state pension is the lowest of any OECD country. The full weekly rate of the UK basic state pension is £134.25 a week. Men born after April 1951 and women born after April 1953 get the new state pension, up to a maximum £175.20. The Pension Policy Institute estimates, however, that only 45 percent of pensioners will qualify for the full amount .

Couples fare the worst—the value of their state pensions decreased 20 percent, from 1994/95 to 2017/18.

The triple lock was introduced in 2010 by the Tory/Liberal Democrat coalition government to sugarcoat plans to attack pensions. The government was determined to roll back so-called gold-plated pensions in the public sector, provoking the biggest strikes in the UK for decades.

In December 2011, over 2 million public sector workers, including civil servants, teachers and lecturers in 37 trade unions, launched a 24-hour strike against proposed attacks to pensions. The subsequent climbdown by public sector unions means that public sector workers now work longer and pay more for inferior pensions.

Further inroads into state pensions have included lifting the retirement age. Between 2010 and 2018, the age that women can apply for the state pension was raised to 65 from 60, and in 2020 it was lifted for both men and women to 66, with plans to raise it to 68 by 2039.

The Conservative Party’s 2017 manifesto proposed replacing the pension triple lock with a double lock by 2020, but this was shelved in a deal with the Democratic Unionist Party, after opposition from the Tories substantial pension-aged base.

Commenting on the SMF’s proposals, pensions expert Ian Browne at wealth management firm Quilter plc said, “[I]t is rightly being brought up again as something that needs to be changed to ensure intergenerational fairness.”

“With the increased borrowing from the government to help pay for the coronavirus lockdown, there has arguably never been a better time politically to replace the triple lock,” Browne commented.

The International Monetary Fund has long pressed the UK to abandon the triple lock and introduce means testing of pensions. An ageing population is viewed under capitalism not as a success story—a product of improved public health under the post war welfare state—but as a non-productive drain on society’s resources away from profits.

Millions in the UK go hungry in the shadow of COVID-19

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/04/20/pove-a20.html






By Harvey Singh
20 April 2020

The number of people facing food insecurity in Britain has quadrupled under the COVID-19 lockdown.

This was the finding by Dr. Rachel Loopstra from King’s College London, in her analysis of data provided in a YouGov survey commissioned by the Food Foundation charity. The survey results indicate that more than three million UK residents have gone hungry in the first three weeks of lockdown.

Respondents said, “someone in their household has been unable to eat, despite being hungry, because they did not have enough food.”

According to the survey, of 8.1 million people (16 percent of the population) in Britain believed to be facing food insecurity during the crisis, just over one fifth (21 percent) did not have enough money to buy adequate food supplies, half were unable to get the food they needed from the shops due to shortages and a quarter were unable to leave their homes and had no other way to get the food they needed.

It found that an estimated 7.1 million people had someone in their household who had to reduce or skip meals because they could not access or afford sufficient sustenance.

The findings reveal that more than 1.5 million adults in Britain are worried about obtaining enough food for themselves and their families, including 53 percent of workers employed in the National Health Service (NHS). Over one million people must go a whole day without food since the UK went into lockdown.

With schools closed, half of parents on low incomes with children eligible for free school meals reported they had not yet received any of the substitute meals promised by the government. This means an estimated 830,000 children are likely to be going without adequate daily nourishment.

In a further threat to life and welfare, 12 percent of those surveyed—equating to 6.1 million adults—said they were struggling to follow the “stay at home” regulations because they had to keep working to survive.

Based on the responses, an equivalent of over one million people had lost all their income, with 43 percent of those who reported a drop in income expecting to receive no help from the government.

The long-term consequences of the current food insecurity will be the further indebtedness of the very poorest. This is indicated by the share reporting they had already had to borrow money (6 percent) in the form of a loan, just a week into the lockdown. Households with children were two-and­-a-half times more likely to have borrowed in order to survive.

On March 21, the government instructed people at greater risk from COVID-19 to self-isolate for 12 weeks. It said it would contact 1.5 million people in this category and set up a system, including local authorities, voluntary organisations, and business, to deliver food parcels to the homes of those who lacked family support.

But according to a report in Guardian, one week later “the scheme [was] not yet running and will take a few weeks to scale up to supplying food to 400,000 people.” The Food Foundation has calculated that already more than twice that number—860,000 people who fall into the medically vulnerable categories—were suffering from food insecurity even before the pandemic crisis.

The antecedent history of the coronavirus pandemic in Britain, as internationally, is one of 12 years of economic and social austerity imposed on the working class. This has been the unrelenting programme of the financial elite following the 2008 global economic crisis.

Years of austerity and below inflation wage increases have had a devastating impact on the conditions of millions of the most vulnerable. In fact, the Food Foundation itself released a report just 18 months ago, revealing that half of all households in the UK were unable to spend enough to meet the cost of the government’s own basic recommended dietary requirements.

As well as a food crisis exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, deteriorating housing conditions are also a major negative factor for workers, placing them at increased risk of infection.

A recent report by the New Policy Institute (NPI) titled “Accounting for the Variation in the Covid-19 Caseload across England: An analysis of the role of multi-generation households, London and time” —placed particular emphasis on the two largest and most affected regions: the capital, London and the second largest city, Birmingham, in the Midlands.

Looking at a single day, April 5, the research established “there is a statistical link across local authority areas between the confirmed COVID-19 caseload and the proportion of households where pensioners and working-age live together, especially in areas of high deprivation.”

Even after allowing for the much higher infection rates in London, the NPI study finds that the top five most-crowded areas in the country have seen up to 70 percent more coronavirus cases than the five least-crowded, where better-off homeowners are likely to live in larger homes, often including spare bedrooms and more than one bathroom.

London, which has 21,357 confirmed cases (with 3,825 deaths in hospitals alone), followed by the Midlands, which has 16,903 cases (with 2,900 hospital deaths) and is fast becoming a new epicentre of the disease in the UK. Both include areas of extreme overcrowding. Over 11 percent of homes in the capital and 9 percent of homes in Birmingham are classed as overcrowded–the two highest rates in the UK.

The report confirms fears that the cramped living conditions in the poorest and most overcrowded parts of Britain’s cities are accelerating the spread of the virus.

NPI director Peter Kenway told the Observer newspaper, “Our models show that even when you allow for the obvious factors, there is still a heightened risk to overcrowded households, especially when you have older people living with younger people,” he said.

Professor Gabriel Scally, President of Epidemiology at the Royal Society of Medicine, said, “Houses in multiple occupation must be in the same category as care homes because of the sheer press of people. I have no doubt that these kinds of overcrowded conditions are tremendously potent in spreading the virus.

“The Victorians paid the price for housing people in fundamentally unsatisfactory, unhealthy places when cholera and typhoid came calling. We’re now in an era of new novel diseases, which will just love the modern equivalent of Victorian slums, where people do not have enough space or, quite possibly, enough ventilation or sunlight.”

The Observer cited the conditions of a handful of families in London and Birmingham.

Walid Alhusien, a 46-year-old pizza delivery driver, “lives with his wife and five children in a room just four metres square in Mitcham, south London. They must share a bathroom and kitchen with four strangers. He fears what might happen if the virus strikes. ‘I can hear two of my neighbours coughing all the time,’ he said. ‘It is really scary. I want to protect my family but what can I do?’”

He is also compelled to work four days a week, “I feel guilty I am taking this risk. I know I could bring it into the house, but I need the money. I have to look after my children’s needs.”

Aisha Malik lives in a severely overcrowded house in Ladywood, Birmingham with elderly parents and her husband, who developed coronavirus symptoms while working in a local supermarket. Malik, her husband and her two children squeeze into one bedroom while her parents sleep on the sofa downstairs. Her sister’s family cram into another bedroom and her siblings must share beds elsewhere in the house.

“My mum and dad are old and vulnerable … they both suffer from diabetes and my dad’s got heart disease as well,” she said. “We are literally all living on top of each other–how can we stay safe?”

The Birmingham constituency of Ladywood has the highest rate of overcrowding outside London and the city also has one of the highest proportions of families sharing with elderly relatives in the country.

The NPI analysis suggests that areas with a high proportion of over-70s sharing with younger families had almost three times the coronavirus cases compared with neighbourhoods where more elderly people lived in their own homes.

The report concludes, “the lockdown is revealing the inequality in our housing … this research shows there is a clear link between local area deprivation and Covid-19 cases.”

The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government stated recently, “We’ve given councils access to £1.6bn to help them during this national emergency, including for finding safe and suitable accommodation for families who need it.”

To put class relations in coronavirus Britain into perspective: £1.6bn is barely one tenth of overall local funding cuts by central government since 2010. The richest 15 individuals in Britain had a collective fortune of £184 billion in 2019, which has only grown since then, far exceeding the annual budget for the NHS throughout the UK.

Unhoused people are most vulnerable to COVID-19, despite declarations of "politics as usual"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYIzwlwHCgc&feature

How German CEOs are profiting from the coronavirus crisis

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/04/20/germ-a20.html






By Peter Schwarz
20 April 2020

The executives of major German corporations are raking in millions from the coronavirus crisis. This emerges from an article in the economic section of the Süddeutsche Zeitung April 15.

The newspaper report is based on figures related to so-called director’s dealings—the buying and selling of shares in a company by its own managers. Such trades are not the same as share buybacks, i.e., the buyback of shares by the company itself. In the latter case, executive members also benefit if they own shares in their own company—the buyback reduces the number of total shares and thus increases the value of the shares remaining.

Director’s dealings should be prohibited as a form of insider trading because top managers invariably have inside information relevant to the future development of the company and their decisions directly influence the share value of the company. Nevertheless, such trading is allowed—managers merely have to follow certain rules and report transactions.

The article in the Süddeutsche Zeitung reports that many executives from Germany’s leading firms registered on stock indexes (e.g., Dax, M-Dax and S-Dax) bought up shares of their own companies after share prices plummeted because of the coronavirus crisis. The article mentions in particular Carsten Spohr (CEO, Lufthansa), Stephan Sturm (Fresenius), Martin Brudermüller and Saori Dubourg (BASF), Rudolf Staudigl (Wacker Chemie) and almost the entire board of Lanxess.

When they bought the shares, the chief executives suspected or knew that the federal government was planning a €600 billion package to support major German corporations and that their share prices would rise again soon. The companies were in close contact with the government at the time.

And it worked. After the Dax tumbled below 8,500 points on March 18 it has since risen steeply and is currently stable above 10,000 points. On April 14, it even reached 10,700 points—an increase of 25 percent within four weeks. This means that leading executives have made a killing while most workers have been forced on to short-time work allowances of 60 percent of salary and must fear for their jobs.

The managers had made use of the same strategy during the 2008 financial crisis, the Süddeutsche reports, citing Olaf Stotz from the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management, who has studied the subject for years.

“Prior to the bankruptcy of the US investment bank Lehman Brothers in mid-September 2008, members of boards of directors, of supervisory boards and persons close to them sold off shares on a large scale,” the article states. “In 2009 they then used the low prices to buy shares in their own companies. The almost 200 share purchases by insiders within just two weeks represented a record high at the time.” The Süddeutsche article does not reveal how many so-called worker representatives sitting on German company supervisory boards also cashed in on these trades.


To recall, at the height of the financial crisis of 2008–2009 the Dax had plunged to a record low of 3,666 points. In February this year it reached a historic high of 13,580 points. Those buying and selling at the right moment could almost quadruple their assets in just 11 years.

Following the 2008 crisis the German government intervened with hundreds of billions of euros to “save” banks and companies. Since then these funds have been recovered through a policy of zero indebtedness and massive cuts in social spending—one reason for the devastating effects of COVID-19, which hit at a time when the German health system was cut to the bone.

It is noteworthy that one of the beneficiaries of this orgy of enrichment is Fresenius CEO Sturm. On March 16, Sturm bought shares in his own company for €57,000. Fresenius is an international health care company and one of the largest private hospital operators in Germany with a market value of $30 billion.

Sturm bought shares when it was reported that the Spanish government intended to nationalise the country’s hospitals, a measure which would have hit Fresenius hard. Two days later, Fresenius announced that speculation about any such nationalisation lacked any basis and the company share price soared by 14 percent.

Compared to BASF CEO Brudermüller, however, Sturm is a small fish. On March 9, Brudermüller bought up shares in his own company to the tune of nearly half a million euros. Two weeks later, the Bundestag passed its €600 billion injection for large corporations. “Were Brudermüller or other company executives involved in drawing up the deal?” Süddeutsche asks. “The response by BASF was evasive: Management is ‘always in regular exchange with many levels of federal and state politics, especially of course in times of crisis.’”

The board of directors of the chemical company Lanxess also intervened heavily in the markets. Its members bought €784,000 worth of shares on March 11, shortly after the company announced a share buyback program.

The enrichment of the Dax bosses is just one example of how the coronavirus crisis is massively exacerbating class conflict in capitalist society. While millions of workers in hospitals, shops and factories risk their lives for starvation wages, lose their jobs, are plunged into debt, or die of COVID-19, the wealthiest social layer is exploiting the crisis to enrich itself even more.

Labour Leaks Confirm Their Worst Prejudices

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yg9eARrt8bg&feature

Hundreds line up to receive free food outside of Washington, D.C. area supermarkets

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/04/20/line-a20.html






By Nick Barrickman
20 April 2020

While national news media outlets have sought to focus on the handful of right-wing protests which have called for a re-opening of the United States’ economy, a social catastrophe for the working population continues to develop in neighborhoods and communities across the country.

On Friday, hundreds of people from Maryland and Virginia lined up outside of local MegaMart supermarkets with the hope of obtaining free baskets of groceries to feed their families. The giveaways, held at four of the Latino-owned stores in the Washington, D.C. area, led to massively long lines which wound around the buildings and disrupted traffic.

Yoni Lopez, owner of the local supermarket chain, told press outlets that his stores quickly ran out of to-go food baskets. Lopez explained that staff began handing out $35 gift coupons to people in line. Anarel Mejia, who was waiting in line, told Fox News: “I don’t want to come out because I worry. I take care of my life. I take care of my son, that’s why… he’s not with me… but I need food… now I think everybody needs help.” Mejia is also an employee of the store.

Like food pantries all across the country, Washington, D.C.-area food banks have reported a sharp increase in demand. According to the local CBS affiliate, the Capital Area Food Bank, which is the largest regional hub for food distribution to the needy, reports a “30%-400%” increase in demand for assistance. The food bank relies on shipments from local supermarkets. Since the onset of the pandemic it has seen a 75 percent drop in such deliveries.

News media outlets were quick to leap on store-goers for violating social distancing procedures. Such acts of desperation, repeatedly seen in cities throughout the country, are an indictment of capitalism’s failure to properly care for the fundamental needs of working people during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Likewise, those suggesting that such conditions indicate the need for a speedy “re-opening” of the US economy, without proper protections in place for workers in grocery stores and other essential locations, will only hasten the spread of COVID-19.


According to Fox, over 400 people showed up Friday morning at MegaMart’s Takoma Park location. The working class suburb is situated on the northeast border of Washington, D.C. and houses a sizable immigrant population. The Washington Post wrote last week that the pandemic is proving to be “particularly devastating” in neighboring Langley Park, which has an 80 percent-immigrant population, a large number of whom are undocumented.

“Here, countless cooks, construction workers and cleaners are suddenly out of a job without any chance of unemployment benefits or federal stimulus checks. Those who still work often do so in close quarters and at high risk of infection,” the Post states. The publication cites a note given to leasers in a local apartment complex, informing them “that, although the coronavirus had closed the leasing office, it had not canceled rent payments, which should be dropped through a slot in a metal box.”

Other nearby jurisdictions, such as neighboring Washington, D.C., have also excluded undocumented and informal workers from receiving rent assistance and other basic help during the pandemic.

While the Washington, D.C. metropolitan region and its surrounding jurisdictions have reported lower numbers than other major population centers in the US, it is expected that the capital area will see a spike in coronavirus infections in the coming weeks. According to the University of Virginia, it is predicted that the commonwealth will see a “surge” in infections in late April or early May, reports WUSA9 .

The Post reported that known COVID-19 cases in the Washington region doubled from around 10,000 to over 20,000 in the week ending Friday. Maryland, which on Friday surpassed 10,000 known cases of the virus, Sunday reported that it had 12,830 confirmed cases and 23 deaths overnight.