THURSDAy, MARCH 5 , 2020. THE WASHINGTON POST eZ sU A
the coronavirus outbreak
BY ERICA WERNER
AND MIKE DEBONISThe House overwhelmingly ap-
proved an $8.3 billion emergency
spending bill Wednesday to com-
bat the coronavirus, sending the
legislation to the Senate, which
could act as soon as Thursday.
President Trump is expected to
sign the legislation, which is more
than triple the size of the White
House’s budget request from last
week. It sends billions to address
nearly every aspect of the out-
break — vaccine research and de-
velopment, support for state and
local p ublic health agencies, medi-
cal supplies and preparation at
home and abroad. The House vote
was 4 15 t o 2.
“Congress is acting with the se-
riousness and s ense o f urgency the
coronavirus threat demands,”
House Appropriations Chair-
woman Nita M. Lowey (D-N.Y.)
said in floor debate ahead of the
vote. “While we all ardently hope
that this public health emergency
does not worsen, House Demo-
crats will not hesitate to act again
if we must augment this funding
with more resources.”
The deal helped fuel a surge on
financial markets Wednesday. The
Dow Jones industrial average
closed up more than 4.5 percent,
or nearly 1,200 points, and the
Nasdaq index was also up 3.8 per-
cent, partly on hopes that U.S.
leaders are working together to
address the s preading outbreak.
“This is the one time the gov-
ernment has moved beyond parti-
san b ickering and is g etting ahead
of a problem before i t grows into a
bigger crisis,” s aid I van Feinseth of
Tigress Financial Partners.
The package includes more
than $3 billion for research and
development on vaccines, thera-
peutics and other treatments, as
well as $2.2 billion for the Centers
for Disease Control and Preven-
tion to support the response from
federal, state and local public
health agencies, including for lab
testing and infection c ontrol.
Other parts of the deal include
close to $1 billion for medical sup-plies, health-care preparedness
and community health centers,
among other things. Also included
is $1 billion in loan subsidies for
small businesses, which Demo-
crats said would enable the Small
Business Administration to pro-
vi de $7 billion in low-interest
loans for companies affected by
the o utbreak.
Some 85 percent of the bill’s
money would be spent domesti-
cally, but there is also $1.25 billion
for the State Department to assist
in battling the virus’s spread over-
seas. This would include evacua-
tion expenses and humanitarian
aid, among other things.
The bill’s f inal price tag dwarfed
a $2.5 billion spending proposal
the White House presented last
week, which was divided between
$1.25 billion in new funds and
$1.25 billion taken from other ac-
counts, such as an Ebola response
fund. By contrast, the congressio-
nal b ill is all n ew m oney.
“We have to recognize this is
one giant step,” House Speaker
Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told re-porters. “In this bill, we’ll go from
the administration putting forth
$2.3 [billion] and money taken
from Ebola and home heating to
over $8 billion i n clean money.”
Lawmakers of both parties
viewed the initial White House
spending proposal as inadequate
to address the crisis at hand, in
terms of both the monetary com-
mitment and public perception of
how Congress and the White
House were responding. Subse-
quently, Trump has said repeated-
ly that he’s open to signing off on
whatever level of funding Con-
gress sends him.
“We’re doing very well in terms
of getting t he f unding w e need, the
necessary funding. I asked for X,
and t hey want to give u s more than
X, and that’s okay,” Trump said
Tuesday during a visit to the Na-
tional Institutes of Health.
The bill also includes a provi-
sion requiring reimbursement of
$136 million the Trump adminis-
tration had previously said it was
transferring from other accounts
to address the v irus.Intense negotiations have been
underway for days among mem-
bers of the appropriations com-
mittees in both chambers to final-
ize the spending bill. Late-stage
talks got hung up over language
Democrats sought to include to
address vaccine affordability,
which some Republicans viewed
as inappropriate price c ontrols.
The issue was finally resolved
Wednesday with inclusion of a
$300 million fund — less than
Democrats initially proposed —
aimed at e nsuring the federal gov-
ernment pays fair prices for coro-
navirus vaccines and drugs, and
that they are made available to
consumers a t affordable prices.
The legislation came together
unusually rapidly on Capitol Hill,
showing that despite partisan
gridlock, lawmakers can act
quickly when they feel they must.
With the coronavirus outbreak,
lawmakers in b oth parties a re con-
fronting growing alarm from their
constituents and health-care pro-
viders in their districts over the
availability o f resources. There a renow more than 150 coronavirus
cases in the United States and 11
deaths — 10 in Washington state
and o ne in California. The number
of infections is growing daily, and
some experts say the t otal could be
much higher if more people were
being t ested.
“This legislation is how this
place is supposed to work — real
substance, forget the politics. We
have an emergency, we really do,”
said Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.).
“This is a moment in time where
we need to step u p for the s afety o f
our families, our communities
and o ur nation.”
The two “no” votes came from
GOP Reps. Andy Biggs (Ariz.) and
Ken Buck (Colo.), both of whom
said the spending levels in the bill
were excessive. Rep. Matt Gaetz
(R-Fla.) wore a gas mask on the
floor of the House as he voted in
favor of t he bill.
[email protected]
[email protected]Thomas Heath contributed to this
report.With ‘sense of urgency,’ House passes an emergency $8.3 billion bill
BY KIMBERLY KINDYWhen Detroit restaurant chef
Nik Cole gets sick, she pops a few
vitamin C tablets, heads into
work and then tops it off with
Alka-Seltzer Plus so she can pow-
er through her day.
She is one of nearly 7 million
food service workers in the Unit-
ed States who is forced to go
without pay if she is too sick to
work. Although 75 percent of
Americans receive some paid sick
days, government and industry
data show that only 25 percent of
food service workers have such
benefits.
“I would have to have a fever
and be really weak in order to call
off for work,” said Cole, 40, who
has worked in food service for 15
years and has never had paid sick
leave. “If you aren’t here, you
don’t get paid. And there is no
way for you to really make up the
hours.”
The U.S. C enters for Disease
Control and Prevention says one
in five workers have reported
working at l east once in the previ-
ous year while sick with vomiting
or diarrhea.
As t he threat of the coronavirus
grows in the United States, pub-
lic-health experts are concerned
about it being spread by sickened
food service workers who pre-
pare, serve and deliver a signifi-
cant share of the meals consum-
ers eat each day.
A mericans depend heavily on
food service workers. Half of all
the money spent on food in the
United States is for meals pre-
pared in restaurants, cafeterias,
food trucks and delis, according
to Te chnomic, a restaurant indus-
try research group. That a mounts
to about one-quarter of all meals
Americans consume.
The food service industry is
already wrestling with the long-
standing threat of another dis-
ease called norovirus, which
causes nearly 60 percent of all
foodborne illness outbreaks. O f
the reported outbreaks, 70 per-
cent are caused by infected food
workers, the CDC says.
The methods used to reduce
the spread of norovirus during
food preparation are the same as
they are for coronavirus: sanitiz-
ing surfaces, proper and frequent
hand washing, coughing into an
elbow instead of a hand.
But those procedures are either
not being properly followed or
they don’t a lways work. T he noro-
virus annually causes millions of
people to develop gastrointesti-nal problems, with thousands
hospitalized and hundreds dying.
Benjamin Chapman, a food
safety expert at North Carolina
State University who studies no-
rovirus and other food-borne dis-
eases, said the good news for
consumers is that coronavirus is
much easier to kill with standard
sanitation products and proce-
dures.
“Norovirus is very resistant to
disinfection,” Chapman said. “It
can persist for months in labs.”
Coronavirus, on the other hand,
dies within two to nine days,
preliminary research shows.
Cole, the head chef at a vegan
restaurant called the Kitchen, istrying to set an example of proper
sanitation for other employees.
She said she routinely sprays sur-
faces with Lysol, frequently wash-
es her hands and uses hand sani-
tizer.
Cole said customers can also
infect food workers, so a hand-
washing station and a bottle of
hand sanitizer is located at the
front of the restaurant. “We can’t
afford to get sick as employees —
please wash your hands, too!” she
said in a phone interview from
the restaurant.
T he National Restaurant Asso-
ciation has renewed efforts to
reeducate workers about safe
food-handling procedures in re-sponse to the coronavirus out-
break. Industry research groups
say that the virus has not affected
business, except in some regions
that specialize in Asian cuisine.
“Even if we were to have some
social disruption of some kind,
people will continue to eat,” said
David Portalatin, a food industry
adviser with the NPD Group, a
market research group. “We may
see what happened in China,
where food delivery increased by
20 percent.”
Consumer trends show that
Americans have grown increas-
ingly comfortable with having
meals regularly delivered to their
homes.
For example, Grubhub, which
delivers meals from takeout and
full-service restaurants to cus-
tomers’ homes, experienced ex-
plosive growth in recent years.
From 2014 to 2019, the company
said it went from delivering at
least one meal a year to 5 million
people to delivering at least one
meal a year to 22.6 million people.
The restaurant industry plays a
large role in the U.S. economy. It
employs about 10 percent of the
private-sector workforce in about
615,000 restaurants across the
country.
The National Restaurant Asso-
ciation said the potent threat of
the coronavirus — and the tight
intersection between American
consumers and the food service
industry — may fuel a movement
to provide more workers with
paid sick days.
“Coronavirus has a unique
quarantine and recovery period
that transcends the traditional
policy debates surrounding paid
sick leave,” said Vanessa Sink,
spokeswoman for the association.
“Tackling this challenge will re-
quire that employees, businesses
and government officials come
together and follow proven pro-cedures to protect the health of
employees, customers and com-
munities.”
New research shows that laws
requiring businesses to offer paid
sick days to service workers may
help. Two Cornell University re-
searchers published a report last
month that revealed that influen-
za infection rates dropped by
11 percent in the first year after
legislatures in 10 states required
employers to offer paid sick leave.
“A ll these arguments that em-
ployees take advantage of it and
become lazy — w e see no evidence
of that,” said Nicolas Ziebarth, an
economist and associate profes-
sor of human ecology at Cornell,
who co-wrote the report. “They
took an average of two days of
paid sick leave after they had
earned it. That is not a crazy
amount of sick leave in a year.
They are not shirking.”
Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.)
introduced legislation last year
that would require all businesses
with 15 or more employees to give
their workers an opportunity to
earn up to seven days a year of
paid sick leave. The sick days
could be used to recover from an
illness, get preventive care, tend
to a sick family member, or attend
meetings related to the health or
disability of a child.
Her legislation did not get trac-
tion — but that was before the
coronavirus struck. Now, a con-
gressional hearing has been
scheduled for next week to dis-
cuss ways to resurrect the pro-
posed law.
“This virus is so highly conta-
gious, it is everyone’s problem...
not just service workers,” Murray
said in an interview. “Everybody
gets hurt.”
[email protected]laura reiley contributed to this
report.Amid contamination worries, food workers unlikely to have paid sick time
AlI lAPeTInA For THe WAsHIngTon PosT
Nik Cole, a chef in Detroit, has never had paid sick leave. The CDC says 1 in 5 workers have reported
working at least once in the previous year while sick with vomiting or diarrhea.BY LORI ARATANIThe government has improved
its ability to respond to outbreaks
that affect the flying public, but
information gaps can hamper ef-
forts to get information to the pub-
lic and to quickly reach those who
may be at r isk of exposure, officials
told a Senate panel Wednesday.
Even as some lawmakers
praised the Trump administra-
tion, saying the decision to restrict
air traffic from China and bar
non-U. S. citizens from affected
regions from entering t he country,
they acknowledged that more
work is needed.
“I want to credit the staff at the
state and local level for all the
work they've done, but I have to
share my f rustration here because
I can't believe that we’re having
some of the conversations we're
having now,” Sen. Ta mmy Duck-
worth (D-Ill.) said.
“A fter h aving faced other global
outbreaks such as H1N1 a nd SARs,
did we not learn anything about
processes and procedures from
those previous diseases?” Duck-
worth said. “ Americans have been
flying commercially for m ore than
a century, yet today on the cusp of
a global pandemic, the inability of
the federal government to collect
and share critical data effectively
with U.S. airlines and local part-
ners is really hindering our ability
to stop the spread and fight this
disease.”
Duckworth’s comments, at a
hearing of the Senate subcommit-
tee o n aviation and s pace, c ame as
California announced its first cor-
onavirus-linked death, bringing
the death toll in the United States
to 11, and as the House passed an
$8.3 billion emergency spending
package to respond to the out-
break.
Witnesses at t he hearing, which
focused on the role of global avia-
tion in containing the spread of
infectious diseases, included rep-
resentatives from the Transporta-
tion Department, the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention,
and U.S. Customs and B order Pro-tection, all of which h ave a role.
“I think w e have improved since
really — my own history is, begins
with the m id-2000s,” s aid Stephen
Redd, director o f the Office o f Pub-
lic Health Preparedness Response
at t he CDC. “I t hink w e’re far a head
of where we were a t that p oint.”
Redd said officials will use les-
sons from this experience to come
up with strategies that will help
with future o utbreaks.
E arlier Wednesday, U.S. airline
executives met with Vice Presi-
dent Pence, w ho has been chargedwith leading the administration's
response to the coronavirus out-
break. President Trump made a
surprise appearance at t he gather-
ing, where airline executives em-
phasized their commitment to
keeping their customers and em-
ployees safe.
“Certainly the industry wants
to do everything we can do keep
Americans safe,” said Southwest
Airlines chief executive Gary Kel-
ly. “ We've stepped up our efforts to
make sure the a irplanes a re c lean,
and we have the proper protocolsin place whenever there is a sus-
pected illness.”
But the industry and federal
health officials remain at odds over
a key element of the effort to track
the spread of the virus — the shar-
ing of contact information for pas-
sengers coming to the United
States on select international
flights.
F ederal health officials want
airlines to provide the informa-
tion so that if they discover some-
one on the flight has the virus,
they can contact people who may
have been exposed to the infected
person.
L ast month, an interim federal
rule was published requiring air-
lines to provide contact informa-
tion, including t he full name, email,
phone numbers and a U.S. address
for passengers within 24 hours af-
ter a request by the director of the
CDC. Under the current system it
can take up to 14 days for health
officials to get the information.
The airlines have pushed back,
saying the task should be the re-
sponsibility of the federal govern-
ment, which already has much of
the i nformation.
Airline e xecutives are backing a
proposal to create a website and
mobile app that would allow pas-
sengers to send their information
directly to the CDC.
“We have thought — and still
think — t hat building a website a nd
developing an app would be the
quickest way to obtain verifiable
and accurate contact info,” said
Nicholas E. Calio, chief e xecutive of
Airlines for America, which repre-sents carriers. “We have been urg-
ing [Health and Human Services]
and CDC to do so for weeks. O ther
countries have already accom-
plished this, and s o should the U.S.”
The proposal seemed to have
won the support from at least two
committee members, S ens. Ted
Cruz (R-Te x.) and Kyrsten Sinema
(D-Ariz.)
“I believe that provides a real
opportunity for us to address this
contact tracing i ssue i n a matter of
several weeks rather than six to 12
months,” Sinema said. “That’s
something I hope we can work
together on and consider how to
implement t hat quickly.”
Representatives from CDC, the
Transportation Department and
Customs and Border Protection
said barring technical challenges,
such a system c ould work.
Currently, Customs and Border
Protection collects passenger in-
formation on paper forms that are
input by hand and then sent to
CDC. The system works, the agen-
cy said, because flight restrictions
mean that only about 1,000 pas-
sengers a day meet the criteria for
data collection. But the agency said
it has the ability to scale up if the
numbers grow. Normally, the num-
ber of passengers arriving from
just China is around 15,000 a day.
“We are told we can get the app
done in two weeks and t he website
would be up and running in four
weeks,” Calio said. “We have of-
fered t o pay for construction o f the
website and give it to the U. S.
government f or their use.”
[email protected]Gaps remain in airlines’ efforts to track passengers, officials tell committee
sUndAy AlAmBA/AssoCIATed Press
Ethiopian Airlines cabin crew members wait to be screened by Nigerian port health officials for the
coronavirus upon arriving at the Murtala Muhammed International Airport in Lagos.