Today, the Justice Department asked a federal court to dismiss its case involving Oakley Training School in Raymond, Mississippi, because the state of Mississippi and the Division of Youth Services have significantly improved conditions for confined youth at Oakley. The reforms, implemented under a consent decree, resulted in increased protections to prevent harm to youth, improved suicide prevention practices, improved medical, dental and mental healthcare, increased rehabilitative services and improved special educational services

The Justice Department reached an agreement today with Real Time Staffing Services LLC, doing business as Select Staffing, a company based in Santa Barbara, California. The settlement resolves the department’s claims that Select Staffing discriminated against work-authorized non-U.S. citizens in violation of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA).

The former chief executive officer of Hanover Corporation was sentenced today to serve 14 years in prison, to be followed by three years of supervised release and ordered to pay $14,784,983.75 in restitution for orchestrating an $18 million Ponzi scheme

The Justice Department today announced that it has reached an agreement with the city of Baltimore, Maryland, to end hiring practices that discriminate against people with disabilities. The agreement, filed as a consent decree along with a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, resolves allegations by the department that the city engaged in a pattern or practice of discrimination under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Title I of the ADA prohibits employers from discriminating against individuals on the basis of disability in various aspects of employment, including hiring

The Justice Department announced today that Massillon, Ohio landlords John and Mary Ruth have agreed to pay $850,000 to settle lawsuits filed by the Justice Department and other parties alleging that the Ruths discriminated on the basis of race and familial status at properties they formerly owned in Massillon. The settlement must still be approved by United States District Judge John R. Adams in the Northern District of Ohio

Today, the Justice Department asked a federal court to dismiss the injunction to address civil rights violations at Saint Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., because the District of Columbia and the Department of Behavioral Health have significantly improved the care and treatment of persons confined to Saint Elizabeths Hospital. Saint Elizabeths is the district’s facility for treating individuals with mental health conditions. The reforms, which were implemented following requirements under a court order, have ensured that persons at Saint Elizabeths Hospital are discharged to the community with adequate supports to live in integrated settings. Further, the reforms resulted in important improvements in integrated treatment planning, psychological and psychiatric services, nursing care and protection from assault.

Eduardo Santiago-Rivera, 45, admitted that in June and July 2012, he caused at least three minors, who ranged in age from 12 to 15, to engage in sexual activity for the purpose of creating videos.

The Justice Department announced today the filing of a lawsuit with the Executive Office for Immigration Review against Louisiana Crane Company LLC (Louisiana Crane), which is headquartered in Eunice, Louisiana.

The Justice Department announced today that it reached an agreement with Culinaire International, a catering and restaurant management company headquartered in Houston, Texas, resolving a claim that Culinaire engaged in citizenship discrimination during the employment eligibility reverification process in violation of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA).

Attorney General Eric Holder released the following statement Wednesday on the resignation of U.S. Attorney Jenny Durkan for the Western District of Washington:

The United States has filed two complaints under the False Claims Act against Michigan neurosurgeon Dr. Aria Sabit, spinal implant company Reliance Medical Systems, two Reliance distributorships—Apex Medical Technologies and Kronos Spinal Technologies—and the companies’ owners, Brett Berry, John Hoffman and Adam Pike.

The Justice Department today filed a lawsuit against the Kent State University, the Kent State University Board of Trustees and university officials for violating the Fair Housing Act by discriminating against students with disabilities in student housing.

The Department of Justice announced today that it has entered into a settlement agreement with the School District of Philadelphia that resolves a religious accommodations lawsuit filed in March 2014. In its lawsuit, the United States alleged that the school district violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VII) by failing to accommodate the religious beliefs, observances and/or practices of Siddiq Abu-Bakr, a school police officer who is Muslim, and similarly-situated employees who maintain a beard longer than one-quarter inch for religious purposes.

Today's Daily Dose brings you news about the acquisition of Portola by Alexion; encouraging results from TG Therapeutics' chronic lymphocytic leukemia trial; Akebia's INNO2VATE trial results; and Vapotherm's Q1 financial results.

Individuals with opioid use disorder (OUD) struggle to get effective care: Of 2 million Americans with the illness, only 26% receive treatment. Now, as the coronavirus pandemic presents an added strain on the U.S. health care system, it is creating greater hardships for those seeking OUD treatment.

At least 95 percent of individuals in state prisons will eventually return to communities. In fact, in a typical year more than half a million people do so, with many more coming from jails. A disproportionate share of these individuals have one or more chronic illnesses.

Care coordination is considered a hallmark of patient-centered treatment and has been shown to improve health outcomes and patient satisfaction as well as reduce costs. Defined as organizing patient care activities and sharing information among all participants concerned with an individual’s treatment plan in order to achieve safer and more effective results, care coordination is increasingly...

The most effective therapy for people with opioid use disorder (OUD) involves the use of Food and Drug Administration-approved medications—methadone, buprenorphine, and naltrexone. Despite evidence that this approach, known as medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD), reduces relapse and saves lives, the vast majority of jails and prisons do not offer this treatment. This brief examines what...

The treatment gap continues to be an obstacle in addressing opioid use disorder (OUD) in the U.S. In 2018, an estimated 2 million Americans had OUD but only about 26% received specialty addiction treatment.

This blog post was written by Deanna Petersen, CBO of AVROBIO, as part of the From The Trenches feature of LifeSciVC. When AVROBIO went public in June 2018, I found myself on the steep end of an unexpected but interesting

The post Recipe For Managing Data Disclosure Successfully With Academic Partners: A Public Gene Therapy Company Perspective appeared first on LifeSciVC.

The biotech IPO market in 2020 remains strong, despite the volatility and COVID headwinds. We’ve seen stellar pricings and good after-market performance, with ten new offerings already this year. And the queue for companies with active S1’s on file is

The post Value Creation And Destruction: Dispersion of Performance In Biotech IPOs appeared first on LifeSciVC.

Business leaders from around the Asia-Pacific met in Sydney last week to discuss the year ahead

Pfizer partners with Valneva to progress Phase II-stage vaccine candidate for Lyme disease.

by Abrahm Lustgarten

The scientists who study how diseases emerge in a changing environment knew this moment was coming. Climate change is making outbreaks of disease more common and more dangerous.

Over the past few decades, the number of emerging infectious diseases that spread to people — especially coronaviruses and other respiratory illnesses believed to have come from bats and birds — has skyrocketed. A new emerging disease surfaces five times a year. One study estimates that more than 3,200 strains of coronaviruses already exist among bats, awaiting an opportunity to jump to people.

The diseases may have always been there, buried deep in wild and remote places out of reach of people. But until now, the planet’s natural defense systems were better at fighting them off.

Today, climate warming is demolishing those defense systems, driving a catastrophic loss in biodiversity that, when coupled with reckless deforestation and aggressive conversion of wildland for economic development, pushes farms and people closer to the wild and opens the gates for the spread of disease.

Aaron Bernstein, the interim director for the C-Change Center for Climate, Health and the Global Environment at Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said that ignoring how climate and rapid land development were putting disease-carrying animals in a squeeze was akin to playing Russian roulette.

“Nature is trying to tell us something,” Bernstein said.

Scientists have not suggested that climate played any direct role in causing the current COVID-19 outbreak. Though the virus is believed to have originated with the horseshoe bat, part of a genus that’s been roaming the forests of the planet for 40 million years and thrives in the remote jungles of south China, even that remains uncertain.

Scientists have, however, been studying the coronaviruses of southern China for years and warning that swift climate and environmental change there — in both loss of biodiversity and encroachment by civilization — was going to help new viruses jump to people.

There are three ways climate influences emerging diseases. Roughly 60% of new pathogens come from animals — including those pressured by diversity loss — and roughly one-third of those can be directly attributed to changes in human land use, meaning deforestation, the introduction of farming, development or resource extraction in otherwise natural settings. Vector-borne diseases — those carried by insects like mosquitoes and ticks and transferred in the blood of infected people — are also on the rise as warming weather and erratic precipitation vastly expand the geographic regions vulnerable to contagion. Climate is even bringing old viruses back from the dead, thawing zombie contagions like the anthrax released from a frozen reindeer in 2016, which can come down from the arctic and haunt us from the past.

Thus the COVID-19 pandemic, even as it unfolds in the form of an urgent crisis, is offering a larger lesson. It is demonstrating in real time the enormous and undeniable power that nature has over civilization and even over its politics. That alone may make the pandemic prologue for more far-reaching and disruptive changes to come. But it also makes clear that climate policy today is indivisible from efforts to prevent new infectious outbreaks, or, as Bernstein put it, the notion that climate and health and environmental policy might not be related is “a ​dangerous delusion.”

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The warming of the climate is one of the principal drivers of the greatest — and fastest — loss of species diversity in the history of the planet, as shifting climate patterns force species to change habitats, push them into new regions or threaten their food and water supplies. What’s known as biodiversity is critical because the natural variety of plants and animals lends each species greater resiliency against threat and together offers a delicately balanced safety net for natural systems. As diversity wanes, the balance is upset, and remaining species are both more vulnerable to human influences and, according to a landmark 2010 study in the journal Nature, more likely to pass along powerful pathogens.

The casualties are amplified by civilization’s relentless push into forests and wild areas on the hunt for timber, cropland and other natural resources. Epidemiologists tracking the root of disease in South Asia have learned that even incremental and seemingly manageable injuries to local environments — say, the construction of a livestock farm adjacent to stressed natural forest — can add up to outsized consequences.

Around the world, according to the World Resources Institute, only 15% of the planet’s forests remain intact. The rest have been cut down, degraded or fragmented to the point that they disrupt the natural ecosystems that depend on them. As the forests die, and grasslands and wetlands are also destroyed, biodiversity sharply decreases further. The United Nations warns that the number of species on the planet has already dropped by 20% and that more than a million animal and plant species now face extinction.

Losing species has, in certain cases, translated directly to a rise in infectious disease.

Americans have been experiencing this phenomenon directly in recent years as migratory birds have become less diverse and the threat posed by West Nile encephalitis has spread. It turns out that the birds that host the disease happen to also be the tough ones that prevail amid a thinned population. Those survivors have supported higher infection rates in mosquitoes and more spread to people.

Similarly, a study published last month in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B found that as larger mammals suffer declines at the hands of hunters or loggers or shifting climate patterns, smaller species, including bats, rats and other rodents, are thriving, either because they are more resilient to the degraded environment or they are able to live better among people.

It is these small animals, the ones that manage to find food in garbage cans or build nests in the eaves of buildings, that are proving most adaptable to human interference and also happen to spread disease. Rodents alone accounted for more than 60% of all the diseases transmitted from animals to people, the researchers found.

Warmer temperatures and higher rainfall associated with climate change — coupled with the loss of predators — are bound to make the rodent problem worse, with calamitous implications. In 1999, for example, parts of Panama saw three times as much rainfall as usual. The rat population exploded, researchers found. And so did the viruses rats carry, along with the chances those viruses would jump to people. That same year, a fatal lung disease transmitted through the saliva, feces and urine of rats and mice called hantavirus pulmonary syndrome emerged in Panama for the first time, according to a report in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases.

As much as weather changes can drive changes in species, so does altering the landscape for new farms and new cities. In fact, researchers attribute a full 30% of emerging contagion to what they call “land use change.” Nothing drives land use shifts more than conversion for farmland and feedstock — a result of the push to feed the planet’s 7.8 billion people. As the global population surges to 10 billion over the next 35 years, and the capacity to farm food is stressed further again by the warming climate, the demand for land will only get more intense. Already, more than one-third of the planet’s land surface, and three-quarters of all of its fresh water, go toward the cultivation of crops and raising of livestock. These are the places where infectious diseases spread most often.

Take, for example, the 1999 Nipah outbreak in Malaysia — the true-life subject matter adapted for the film “Contagion.” Rapid clearcutting of the forests there to make way for palm plantations drove fruit bats to the edge of the trees. (Separate research also suggests that climate changes are shifting fruit bats’ food supply.) They found places to roost, as it happens, alongside a hog farm. As the bats gorged themselves on fruit, they dropped pieces of food from the branches, along with their urine, into the pigsties, where at least one pig is believed to have eaten some. When the pig was slaughtered and brought to market, an outbreak is believed to have been spread by the man who handled the meat. More than 100 people died.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that fully three-quarters of all new viruses have emerged from animals. Even the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa is believed to have begun when a boy dug into a tree stump that happened to be the roost of bats carrying the virus.

As Christine Johnson, the associate director of the One Health Institute, an interdisciplinary epidemiological program at the University of California, Davis, puts it, global health policymakers have a responsibility to understand how climate, habitat and land use changes lead to disease. Almost every major epidemic we know of over the past couple of decades — SARS, COVID-19, Ebola and Nipah virus — jumped to people from wildlife enduring extreme climate and habitat strain, and still, “we’re naive to them,” she said. “That puts us in a dangerous place.”

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Once new diseases are let loose in our environment, changing temperatures and precipitation are also changing how those diseases spread — and not for the better. Warming climates increase the range within which a disease can find a home, especially those transmitted by “vectors,” mosquitoes and ticks that carry a pathogen from its primary host to its new victim.

A 2008 study in the journal Nature found nearly one-third of emerging infectious diseases over the past 10 years were vector-borne, and that the jumps matched unusual changes in the climate. Especially in cases where insects like infection-bearing mosquitoes are chasing warmer temperatures, the study said, “climate change may drive the emergence of diseases.”

Ticks and mosquitoes now thrive in places they’d never ventured before. As tropical species move northward, they are bringing dangerous pathogens with them. The Zika virus or Chikungunya, a mosquito-spread virus that manifests in intense joint pain, were once unseen in the United States, but both were transmitted locally, not brought home by travelers, in southern Texas and Florida in recent years.

Soon, they’ll be spreading further northward. According to a 2019 study in the journal PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, by 2050, disease-carrying mosquitoes will ultimately reach 500 million more people than they do today, including some 55 million more Americans. In 2013, dengue fever — an affliction affecting nearly 400 million people a year, but normally associated with the poorest regions of Africa — was transmitted locally in New York for the first time.

“The long-term risk from dengue may be much higher than COVID,” said Scott Weaver, the director of the Institute for Human Infections and Immunity at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. “It’s a disease of poor countries, so it doesn’t get the attention it deserves.”

The chain of events that ultimately leads to a pandemic can be long and subtle, steered by shifts in the ecosystem. The 1999 West Nile outbreak in the U.S., for example, came after climate-driven droughts dried up streams and rivers, leaving pools of stagnant water where mosquitoes bred unhindered. It turns out the loss of water also killed off their predators — dragonflies and frogs that depend on large watering holes were gone.

Coronaviruses like COVID-19 aren’t likely to be carried by insects — they don’t leave enough infected virus cells in the blood. But one in five other viruses transmitted from animals to people are vector-borne, said U.C. Davis’ Johnson, meaning it’s only a matter of time before other exotic animal-driven pathogens are driven from the forests of the global tropics to the United States or Canada or Europe because of the warming climate. “Climate is going to shift vulnerability to that,” Johnson said, “and I think some of these regions are not prepared.”

The changing climate won’t just affect how the diseases move about the planet, it will also shape how easily we get sick. According to a 2013 study in the journal PLOS Currents Influenza, warm winters were predictors of the most severe flu seasons in the following year. The brief respite in year one, it turns out, relaxed people’s natural defenses and reduced “herd immunity,” setting conditions for the virus to rage back with a vengeance.

Even harsh swings from hot to cold, or sudden storms — exactly the kinds of climate-induced patterns we’re already seeing — make people more likely to get sick. A study in the journal Environmental Research Letters linked the brutal 2017-18 flu season — which killed 79,000 people — to erratic temperature swings and extreme weather that winter, the same period in which a spate of floods and hurricanes devastated much of the country. If the climate crisis continues on its current trajectory, the authors wrote, respiratory infections like the flu will sharply increase. The chance of a flu epidemic in America’s most populated cities will increase by as much as 50% this century, and flu-related deaths in Europe could also jump by 50%.

“We’re on a very dangerous path right now,” said the University of Texas’ Weaver. Slow action on climate has made dramatic warming and large-scale environmental changes inevitable, he said, “and I think that increases in disease are going to come along with it.”

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Twelve months before the first COVID-19 case was diagnosed, a group of epidemiologists working with a U.S. Agency for International Development project called PREDICT, or Pandemic Influenza and other Emerging Threats, was deep in the remote leafy jungle of southern China’s Yunnan province hunting for what it believed to be one of the greatest dangers to civilization: a wellspring of emerging viruses.

A decade of study there had identified a pattern of obscure illnesses affecting remote villagers who used bat guano as fertilizer and sometimes for medicine. Scientists traced dozens of unnamed, emerging viruses to caves inhabited by horseshoe bats. Any one of them might have triggered a global pandemic killing a million people. But luck — and mostly luck alone — had so far kept the viruses from leaping out of those remote communities and into the mainstream population.

The luck is likely to run out, as Yunnan is undergoing enormous change. Quaint subsistence farm plots were overtaken by hastily erected apartment towers and high-speed rail lines, as the province endured dizzying development fueled by decades of Chinese economic expansion. Cities’ footprints swelled, pushing back the forests. More people moved into rural places and the wildlife trade, common to such frontier regions, thrived. With every new person and every felled tree, the bats’ habitat shrank, putting the viruses they carried on a collision course with humanity. By late 2018, epidemiologists there were bracing for what they call “spillover,” or the failure to keep a virus locally contained as it jumped from the bats and villages of Yunnan into the wider world.

In late 2018, the Trump administration, as part of a sweeping effort to bring U.S. programs in China to a halt, abruptly shut down the research — and its efforts to intercept the spread of a new novel coronavirus along with it. “We got a cease and desist,” said Dennis Carroll, who founded the PREDICT program and has been instrumental in global work to address the risks from emerging viruses. By late 2019, USAID had cut the program’s global funding.

USAID did not respond to a detailed list of questions from ProPublica.

The loss is immense. The researchers believed they were on the cusp of a breakthrough, racing to sequence the genes of the coronaviruses they’d extracted from the horseshoe bat and to begin work on vaccines. They’d campaigned for years for policymakers to fully consider what they’d learned about how land development and climate changes were driving the spread of disease, and they thought their research could literally provide governments a map to the hot spots most likely to spawn the next pandemic. They also hoped the genetic material they’d collected could lead to a vaccine not just for one lethal variation of COVID, but perhaps — like a missile defense shield for the biosphere — to address a whole family of viruses at once. (In fact, the gene work they were able to complete was used to test the efficacy of remdesivir, an experimental drug that early clinical trial data shows can help COVID-19 patients.)

Carroll said knowledge of the virus genomes had the potential “to totally transform how we think about future biomedical interventions before there’s an emergence.” His goal was to not just react to a pandemic, but to change the very definition of preparedness.

If PREDICT’s efforts in China had the remote potential to fend off the current COVID pandemic, though, it also offered an opportunity to study how climate and land development were driving disease.

But there has been little appetite for that inquiry among policymakers. PREDICT’s staff and advisers have pushed the U.S. government to consider how welding public health policy with environmental and climate science could help stem the spread of contagions. Climate change was featured in presentations that PREDICT staff made to Congress, according to U.C. Davis’ Johnson, who is now also the director of PREDICT, which received a temporary funding extension this spring. And until 2016, leadership of New York-based EcoHealth Alliance, the research group working under PREDICT funding in Yunnan, was invited several times to the White House to advise on global health policy.

Since Donald Trump was elected, the group hasn’t been invited back.

“It’s falling on deaf ears,” said Peter Daszak, EcoHealth Alliance’s president.

A White House spokesperson did not respond to an emailed request for comment.

What Daszak really wants — in addition to restored funding to continue his work — is the public and leaders to understand that it’s human behavior driving the rise in disease, just as it drives the climate crisis. In China’s forests, he looks past the destruction of trees and asks why they are being cut in the first place, and who is paying the cost. Metals for iPhones and palm oil for processed foods are among the products that come straight out of South Asian and African emerging disease hot spots.

“We turn a blind eye to the fact that our behavior is driving this,” he said. “We get cheap goods through Walmart, and then we pay for it forever through the rise in pandemics. It’s upside down.”

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by Joshua Kaplan and Benjamin Hardy

On April 17 in Toledo, Ohio, a 19-year-old black man was arrested for violating the state stay-at-home order. In court filings, police say he took a bus from Detroit to Toledo “without a valid reason.” Six young black men were arrested in Toledo last Saturday while hanging out on a front lawn; police allege they were “seen standing within 6 feet of each other.” In Cincinnati, a black man was charged with violating stay-at-home orders after he was shot in the ankle on April 7; according to a police affidavit, he was talking to a friend in the street when he was shot and was “clearly not engaged in essential activities.”

Ohio’s health director, Dr. Amy Acton, issued the state’s stay-at-home order on March 22, prohibiting people from leaving their home except for essential activities and requiring them to maintain social distancing “at all times.” A violation of the order is a misdemeanor, punishable by up to 90 days in jail and a $750 fine. Since the order, hundreds of people have been charged with violations across Ohio.

The state has also seen some of the most prominent protests against state stay-at-home orders, as large crowds gather on the statehouse steps to flout the directives. But the protesters, most of them white, have not faced arrest. Rather, in three large Ohio jurisdictions ProPublica examined, charges of violating the order appear to have fallen disproportionately on black people.

ProPublica analyzed court records for the city of Toledo and for the counties that include Columbus and Cincinnati, three of the most populous jurisdictions in Ohio. In all of them, ProPublica found, black people were at least four times as likely to be charged with violating the stay-at-home order as white people.

As states across the country attempt to curb the spread of COVID-19, stay-at-home orders have proven instrumental in the fight against the novel coronavirus; experts credit aggressive restrictions with flattening the curve in the nation’s hotbeds. Many states’ orders carry criminal penalties for violations of the stay-at-home mandates. But as the weather warms up and people spend more time outside, defense lawyers and criminal justice reform advocates fear that black communities long subjected to overly aggressive policing will face similarly aggressive enforcement of stay-at-home mandates.

In Ohio, ProPublica found, the disparities are already pronounced.

As of Thursday night in Hamilton County, which is 27% black and home to Cincinnati, there were 107 charges for violating the order; 61% of defendants are black. The majority of arrests came from towns surrounding Cincinnati, which is 43% black. Of the 29 people charged by the city’s Police Department, 79% were black, according to data provided to ProPublica by the Hamilton County Public Defender.

In Toledo, where black people make up 27% of the population, 18 of the 23 people charged thus far were black.

Lt. Kellie Lenhardt, a spokeswoman for the Toledo Police Department, said that in enforcing the stay-at-home order, the department’s goal is not to arrest people and that officers are primarily responding to calls from people complaining about violations of the order. She told ProPublica that if the police arrested someone, the officers believed they had probable cause, and that while biased policing would be “wrong,” it would also be wrong to arrest more white people simply “to balance the numbers.”

In Franklin County, which is 23.5% black, 129 people were arrested between the beginning of the stay-at-home order and May 4; 57% of the people arrested were black.

In Cleveland, which is 50% black and is the state’s second-largest city, the Municipal Court’s public records do not include race data. The court and the Cleveland Police Department were unable to readily provide demographic information about arrests to ProPublica, though on Friday, the police said they have issued eight charges so far.

In the three jurisdictions, about half of those charged with violating the order were also charged with other offenses, such as drug possession and disorderly conduct. The rest were charged only with violating the order; among that group, the percentage of defendants who were black was even higher.

Franklin Country is home to Columbus, where enforcement of the stay-at-home order has made national headlines for a very different reason. Columbus is the state capital and Ohio’s largest city with a population of almost 900,000. In recent weeks, groups of mostly white protesters have campaigned against the stay-at-home order on the Statehouse steps and outside the health director’s home. Some protesters have come armed, and images have circulated of crowds of demonstrators huddled close, chanting, many without masks.

No protesters have been arrested for violating the stay-at-home order, a spokesperson for the Columbus mayor’s office told ProPublica. Thomas Hach, an organizer of a group called Free Ohio Now, said in an email that he was not aware of any arrests associated with protests in the entire state. The Columbus Division of Police did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment.

Ohio legislators are contemplating reducing the criminal penalties for violating the order. On Wednesday, the state House passed legislation that would eliminate the possibility of jail time for stay-at-home violators. A first offense would result in a warning, and further violations would result in a small fine. The bill is pending in the state Senate.

Penalties for violating stay-at-home orders vary across the country. In many states, including California, Florida, Michigan and Washington, violations can land someone behind bars. In New York state, violations can only result in fines. In Baltimore, police told local media they had only charged two people with violations; police have reportedly relied on a recording played over the loudspeakers of squad cars: “Even if you aren’t showing symptoms, you could still have coronavirus and accidentally spread it to a relative or neighbor. Being home is being safe. We are all in this together.”

Enforcement has often resulted in controversy. In New York City, a viral video showed police pull out a Taser and punch a black man after they approached a group of people who weren’t wearing masks. Police say the man who was punched took a “fighting stance” when ordered to disperse. In Orlando, police arrested a homeless man walking a bicycle because he was not obeying curfew. In Hawaii, charges against a man accused of stealing a car battery, normally a misdemeanor punishable by up to 30 days in jail, were enhanced to a felony, which can result in 10 years in prison, because police and prosecutors said he was in violation of the state order.

The orders are generally broad, and decisions about which violations to treat as acceptable and which ones to penalize have largely been left to local police departments’ discretion.

Kristen Clarke, president of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a legal organization focused on racial justice, said such discretion has opened the door to police abuse, and she said the U.S. Department of Justice or state governments should issue detailed guidelines about when to make arrests. That discretion “is what’s given rise to these rogue practices,” she told ProPublica, “that are putting black communities and communities of color with a target on their backs.”

In jails and prisons around the country, inmates have fallen ill or died from COVID-19 as the virus spreads rapidly through the facilities. Many local governments have released some inmates from jail and ordered police to reduce arrests for minor crimes. But in Hamilton County, some people charged with failing to maintain social distancing have been kept in jail for at least one night, even without any other charges. Recently, two sheriff’s deputies who work in the jail tested positive for COVID-19. “The cops put their hands on them, they cram them in the car, they take them to the [jail], which has 800 to 1400 people, depending on the night,” said Sean Vicente, director of the Hamilton County Public Defender’s misdemeanor division. “It’s often so crowded everyone’s just sitting on the floor.”

Clarke said the enforcement push is sometimes undercutting the public health effort: “Protecting people’s health is in direct conflict with putting people in overcrowded jails and prisons that have been hotbeds for the virus.”

Court records show that the Cincinnati Police Department has adopted some surprising applications of the law.

Six people were charged with violations of the order after they were shot. Only one was charged with another crime as well, but police affidavits state that when they were shot, they were or likely were in violation of the order. One man was shot in the ankle while talking to a friend, according to court filings, and “was clearly not engaged in essential activities.” Another was arrested with the same explanation; police wrote that he had gone to the hospital with a gunshot wound. The Cincinnati Police Department did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment.

In Springfield Township, a small, mostly white Cincinnati suburb, nine people have been arrested for violating the order thus far. All of them are black.

Springfield Township Police Chief Robert Browder told ProPublica in an email that the department is “an internationally accredited law enforcement organization” and has “strict policies ... to ensure that our zero tolerance policy prohibiting bias-based profiling is adhered to.”

Browder said race had not played a role in his department’s enforcement of the order and that he was “appalled if that is the insinuation.”

Several of the black people arrested in Springfield Township were working for a company that sells books and magazine subscriptions door to door. One of the workers, Carl Brown, 50, said he and five colleagues were working in Springfield Township when two members of the team were arrested while going door to door. Police called the other sales people, and when they arrived at the scene, they too were arrested. Five of them, including Brown, were charged only with violating the stay-at-home order; the sixth sales person had an arrest warrant in another state, according to Browder, and police also charged her for giving them false identification.

Brown said one of the officers had left the group with a warning: They should never come back, and if they do, it’s “going to be worse.”

Browder denied that the officers made such a threat, and he said the police had received calls from residents about the sales people and their tactics and that the sales people had failed to register with the Police Department, as required for door-to-door solicitation.

Other violations in Hamilton County have been more egregious, but even in some of those cases, the law enforcement response has stirred controversy. On April 4, a man who had streamed a party on Facebook Live, saying, “We don’t give a fuck about this coronavirus,” was arrested in Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine neighborhood, the setting of a 2001 riot after police fatally shot an unarmed black man.

The man who streamed the party, Rashaan Davis, was charged with violating the stay-at-home order and inciting violence, and his bond was set at $350,000.

After Judge Alan Triggs said he would release Davis from jail pretrial because the offense charged was nonviolent, local media reported, prosecutors dropped the misdemeanor and said they would focus on the charge of inciting violence, a felony.

The Hamilton County prosecutor’s office declined to comment on Davis’ case.

In Toledo, there’s been public controversy around perceived differences in the application of the law. On April 21, debate at the Toledo City Council meeting centered around a food truck. Local politicians discussed recent arrests of young black people at house parties, some contrasting them with a large, white crowd standing close together in line outside a BBQ stand, undisturbed by police. Councilmember Gary Johnson told ProPublica he’s asked the police chief to investigate why no one was arrested at a party he’d heard about, where white people were congregating on docks. “I don’t know the circumstances of the arrests,” he said. But “if you feel you need to go into poor neighborhoods and African American neighborhoods, you better be going into white neighborhoods too. … You have to say we’re going to be heavy-handed with the stay-at-home order or we’re going to be light with it. It has to be one or the other.”

Toledo police enforcement has not been confined to partygoers. Armani Thomas, 20, is one of the six young men arrested for not social distancing on a lawn. He told ProPublica he was sitting there with nine friends “doing nothing” when the police pulled up. Two kids ran off, and the police made the rest stay, eventually arresting “all the dudes” and letting the girls go. He was taken to the county jail, where several inmates have tested positive, for booking and released after several hours. The men’s cases are pending.

“When police see black people gathered in public, I think there’s this looming belief that they must be doing something illegal,” RaShya Ghee, a criminal defense attorney and lecturer at the University of Toledo, told ProPublica. “They’re hanging out in a yard — something illegal must have happened. Or, something illegal is about to happen.”

Lenhardt, the police lieutenant, said the six men were arrested after police received 911 calls reporting “a group gathering and flashing guns.” None of the six men were arrested on gun charges. As for the 19-year-old charged for taking the bus without reason, she said police asked him on consecutive days to not loiter at a bus station.

With more than 70,000 Americans dead from the coronavirus, government officials have not figured out how to balance the threat of COVID-19 with the harms of over policing, Clarke said. “On the one hand, we want to beat back the pandemic. That’s critical. That’s the end goal,” she told ProPublica. “On the other hand, we’re seeing social distancing being used as a pretext to arrest the very communities that have been hit hardest by the virus.”

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Pharmacies dispensed approximately 35% more prescriptions in March 2020, compared with the previous month, according to a survey by the National Pharmacy Association.

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