Respond to prefers-color-scheme dark in app web views

Follow section front redirects in Spectrum

Enable NLP source in PCS for load testing

Switch off the News Alerts Survey Widget when we have enough responses

Poll to determine if new LUF updates are available

Allows the winning A/B test variant to be turned on without Spectrum deployment

Show infinite scrolling sections in Assembler MultiView

Show option for NLP article summaries in Action Bar

Show NLP summaries collection recirc on article pages

A general feature flag for Recipe Features that aren't yet released

Feature flag for media team features that aren't yet released

Use new Orca video player for preroll plugin in Spectrum

Show the snow tracker (instead of the heat tracker) on Spectrum

Miss Manners: My relative’s memoir was poorly written and boring

Ask Amy: What if the mysterious mourner at my dad’s memorial is my brother? 

Carolyn Hax: Is it ‘charming’ to stage a surprise wedding at a family reunion?

Man, 91, shocks tiny firehouse with $500K gift: ‘Nobody knew how much I’d saved’

Retired cop meets abandoned baby he helped 23 years ago: ‘What are the odds?’

I used to dismiss my mom’s advice. Then I found a note she wrote before she died.  

Tired of overcrowded national parks? Here’s how to go backcountry camping.

Airlines are trying to stop Biden from enforcing ‘junk fees’ rule

Pete Buttigieg’s view from the middle seat

Nationals-White Sox rained out; Josiah Gray edges closer to return

Senator will block RFK site bill unless team honors family of logo creator

Victor Robles has been driving everyone crazy for years. Enough is enough.    

Haiti’s plight is a case study in the ‘responsibility to protect’

No, Apple, people do not want tech to crush everything in its path 

The urgent air defense lessons of April 16 

Can you spot bad financial advice on TikTok? Take our quiz.

5 myths about Social Security as the program faces a funding crisis

Social Security has to be fixed. But you still need your own savings.

Manhunt on for convict freed in deadly attack on prison convoy in France

U.S. threats led to rupture of vital military ties, Nigerien leader says

14 dead after massive billboard in Mumbai collapses on gas station

OpenAI wants users to act natural around ChatGPT

These four searches show how Google is changing

Why Jack Dorsey gave up on Bluesky

Trump is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of being a cad

Election 2024 latest news: Primary elections today in Maryland, Nebraska, West Virginia

Biden once nearly died of an aneurysm. Risky surgery changed his life.

Biodegradable fabric might be the next best thing in clothing

Are home prices still rising? See how prices have changed in your area.

Gold bars and cash: Sen. Menendez corruption trial begins

Election 2024 live updates: Primary elections in Maryland, Nebraska and West Virginia

Angela Alsobrooks and David Trone are Democratic primary candidates for the US Senate seat in Maryland

Health

Well+Being

Opinions

Higher Education

Education

https://www.washingtonpost.com/coronavirus/

Coronavirus pandemic

Skyler Reid

NEW YORK — Soldiers in camouflage and civilians in polo shirts lined up for a life-or-death battle: Keeping a potentially deadly virus from overrunning this makeshift hospital inside a 2.1-million-square-foot convention center within the densest, most populous city in America.

Colored tape on the floor marked where to stand. Six feet. Six feet. Six feet. Proceed to the neon yellow box. Answer the soldier’s questions.

“Have you touched someone who is covid positive without PPE?”

No, ma’am. No, ma’am. A drone with an infrared sensor perched on the entry desk like a robotic raven taking people’s temperatures. In <a href="https://www.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_5959910" title="www.thepaper.cn">Nanjing, China</a>, the government sent a similar drone flying apartment to apartment to ferret out the sick. Here, if someone “pops hot,” as one soldier said, they’ll be descended upon by medics and rushed to an isolation tent. Every visitor cleared to enter is also issued protective gear, including a face mask.

This is the procedure for entering the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, steps from the Hudson River on Manhattan’s west side. The massive, glass-walled event hall, usually home to cocktail-swilling conference-goers or Comic-Con superfans, has been abuzz with urgent activity in a race to assist a city being overwhelmed by the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/coronavirus/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">coronavirus</a> pandemic.

[New York’s scramble to brace for peak crisis a siren for the rest of U.S.]

More than 15 city, state and federal agencies — ranging from military engineers to Javits Center carpenters — built the initial 1,000-bed hospital from scratch inside of a week. On Thursday night they finished with a second wing holding 2,000 additional beds. By Tuesday, they project to have finished the third and final phase, adding 1,000 more. Other convention centers in Detroit and Miami have been calling for advice — how do you build a hospital in a place that wasn’t designed for it? — as this brutal disease spreads.

Demetrius Freeman for The Washington Post

The plan until Wednesday had been to keep the Javits New York Medical Station, or JNYMS as they’re calling it, free of covid-19. The station was to take on “low acuity” patients, those recovering from surgery or with diabetes flare-ups who could be released in a few days, to relieve hospitals citywide, where the crush of thousands of covid-19 patients has left no capacity for treating other ailments.

By Thursday, however, amid an outcry from hospital administrators incredulous that the Javits Center was sitting near-empty while their doctors and nurses were being overwhelmed, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) announced that he’d requested, and that President Trump had granted, permission for the convention hall to assume a new mission. The makeshift medical station that was supposed to be covid-free is now covid-only. Its 11 patients were transferred to the USNS Comfort, the military medical ship deployed from Norfolk, and docked around 20 blocks north of the Javits at Pier 90.

On Saturday, <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/us/coronavirus-patients-delivered-comfort-ship-new-york-mistake" title="www.foxnews.com">Fox News reported</a> that a few of those transferred to the Comfort, which was supposed to remain free of covid patients, tested positive for the disease and were sent back to the Javits Center. (As seen with cruise ships and the covid-embattled aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, the virus can ravage close quarters at sea.) Officials who confirmed the development characterized it as a mistake. Navy officials called it part of the process and that medical professionals assessed risk to the crew was low.

As of Saturday evening, the JNYMS had 40 patients.

'A 24-hour operation, without an end date'

Folding table upon folding table, each with its own set of workers, divided by stanchions, filled the Multi-Agency Command Center on Level 4. Sunlight poured in from 135-foot-high glass walls. Uniformed personnel from the Army and Air Force National Guard, the Navy, the U.S. Public Health Service, and the New York City Department of Health practiced social distancing. The array of jumpsuits and military jargon could be confusing to the civilians present. “What I’ve learned is that if you’re in the military, you only talk in acronyms, and I don’t follow acronyms very well,” said Javits CEO Alan Steel, who said he was nonetheless impressed at how his military colleagues’ practice of having a meeting every hour kept communication flowing.

“Attention all personnel, remember to maintain six feet of separation to prevent the spread of the virus. Thank you,” blared an announcement scheduled to go off every hour.

Almost no one wore a mask, though that changed just as soon as the first covid patients arrived.

The Javits Center is owned by New York state, but the 4,000-bed medical center inside it is a federal operation. In mid-March, when Cuomo ordered an end to gatherings larger than 500 people, Steel put his staff in “maintenance mode” — mainly restoring the building and planning for the shows they hope to start hosting again in July. He sent most to work from home. The 3,000 skilled, hourly-rate tradesmen — carpenters, electricians, plumbers, forklift operators — reverted to “their normal work condition, which is if there is not an event, then they’re not working here,” he said.

But within days, the Army Corps of Engineers inquired about turning the conventional hall into a possible hospital. The first supplies arrived March 20, and people went back to work.

One hundred and sixty miles to the north, in Rotterdam, N.Y., Col. Dennis Deeley’s phone rang. The Guard had an assignment for him.

“I called my fiance of 20-some-odd years and said, ‘Hey, I gotta go, can you start packing?’ And she said, ‘We’ve been through this before. I’m packing,’ ” said Deeley, who is now the JNYSM incident commander. “I’m really just the coordinator,” he says. “I’m getting everybody together to meet from all the different colored jumpsuits you saw out there.”

From an initial team of 10, Deeley’s core staff grew to 50, while the total National Guard presence is around 400. Overall, the total number of people on site fluctuates between 1,000 and 1,500.

“I don’t know how to manage a hospital,” Deeley said, noting that the health care portion of the operation comprises medical experts from the Army and the U.S. Public Health Service. “I can build one, but I don’t know how to manage it.”

This is the biggest job Deeley has ever done, he said — a big step up from serving as a task force commander with 600 soldiers reporting to him in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, which throttled the Northeast in 2012 and required the Pentagon to assemble a massive humanitarian response. Having only military folks to command back then, he said, “I’d just tell them what I needed them to do and they’d do it. So right now, because I’m tired, it feels like 10 times more than what I’ve handled before.”

If he could do anything over again, he said he’d bring “somebody else so I could get some sleep.”

[Army seeks retired medical personnel to rejoin service to combat the coronavirus]

Meanwhile, Ken Dixon, the Javits Center’s head of security, was dealing with a nightmare of protecting the building from both unauthorized visitors and an invisible enemy in covid-19. His team is using only two of the building’s 225 perimeter doors — with the help of the New York City police, the New York State police and the National Guard. Already, they’ve had patients who’ve tried to walk in through the front door — seeking a coronavirus test or trying to get admitted — rather than first seeking transfer from a hospital.

They called an ambulance for the woman who showed up with covid-19 symptoms, but a Javits security guard is now one of two people on staff who have the disease — and 25 percent of Dixon’s security team is self-quarantining.

“It’s not even a comparison,” said Dixon, when asked whether this is bigger and more stressful than a normal Javits show. “It’s a major undertaking. It’s a 24-hour operation, really, without an end date.”

A day later, covid-19 entered the building

On Level 3, in the big expo halls that around now would be hosting the New York Auto Show, carpenters arrived that first week and built out the bones of the medical station within four hours. Union electrician Robert Porazzo, was pulling up cables he’d just put down for the third time in a corner of Phase 2 that had started off as hospital beds, turned into a spot for X-ray unit, and was now going to be a place for doing lab tests.

“We consider this to be a show. We do this all the time,” he said. “We get one plan, okay, we put everything out, no wait, hang on, they want something else.”

After this job, carpenter Latoya Bolen, like Porazzo, expects to seek unemployment benefits. Typically, events such as the auto show employ up 2,000 people. The hospital build has required fewer than 100. Bolen said she counts on the busy first six months of the year to help her care for her ailing mother and take her through the down times for Javits events in late summer. “It definitely hit me hard. I would say 30 percent of my income is no longer available to me,” she said. “I speak to a lot of my co-workers and they weren’t financially prepared for this.”

Mariam Karim, the head of in-house catering, had to transition from designing menus of luxury hors d’oeuvres to mimicking buffet meals at a military mess hall. “We got everyone to agree on the same menu,” Karim said. “Do I want to have contracts with 17 different agencies? No.”

Demetrius Freeman

The JNYSM includes a pharmacy in a concession stand and nursing stations built from scratch. Kenneth Sanchez, head of facilities for the Javits Center, said that one of the hardest things to find were the 50 mobile showers his team amassed from as far away as Georgia. The vendors had to unlock their businesses to fill the orders, he said.

Already, supplies like the modular walls Javits used are growing scarce, as convention centers around the country have started to build their own emergency hospitals. “Whereas three weeks ago, you could have called someone and said, ‘Give me a thousand walls tomorrow,’ ” Steel said, “now they’ll say, ‘I’m sorry. They’re in Chicago. They’re in Las Vegas. They’re in Houston.’ ”

The expectation is that FEMA will reimburse the Javits Center for their costs. As a “public benefit corporation” that provides a service to the state by bringing in people who spend money on restaurants and hotels, the facility doesn’t rely on taxpayer dollars. It simply looks to break even each year.

Down another corridor strange commands floated into the hallway: “Forward, back, down, up,” a medic told a National Guardsman who was wearing an N95 mask under what looked like the hood for a hazmat suit. Soldiers were lined up — six feet apart — for the chance to bow and shake like they were at a concert thrashing in a mosh pit. It was a simulation to test the fit of their masks and mimic a confined environment.

A day later, covid-19 entered the building.

Josh Dawsey and Missy Ryan in Washington contributed to this report.

Unleashing Oppenheimer: Inside Christopher Nolan's Explosive Atomic-Age Thriller

Yale University, BA in history

Jada Yuan is a writer for The Washington Post's Style section focusing on culture and entertainment, after several years covering national politics and two very different First Ladies. She spent 2018 circumnavigating the globe as the first 52 Places Traveler for The New York Times, and was a longtime culture writer for New York magazine. 

Jada Yuan

The Washington Post

 Javits Center Walk Through 

For The Washington Post

staff

U.S. cases and deaths by state

World map

New CDC guidance

When am I still contagious?

The people who never get covid

Coronavirus

iptc-media/science_and_technology/research

iptc-media/politics

iptc-media/health/healthcare_policy/government_health_care/Medicare

iptc-media/conflict_war_and_peace

iptc-media/health

iptc-media/health/health_treatment/medicine

iptc-media/health/diseases_and_conditions/communicable_disease

iptc-media/health/health_facility/hospital_and_clinic

iptc-media/science_and_technology/research/medical_research

iptc-media/politics/government

iptc-media/health/health_treatment

iptc-media/science_and_technology

iptc-media/health/healthcare_policy

iptc-media/health/healthcare_policy/government_health_care

iptc-media/health/diseases_and_conditions/communicable_disease/virus_disease

iptc-media/health/health_facility

iptc-media/health/diseases_and_conditions

iptc-media/politics/government/defence

iptc-media/conflict_war_and_peace/armed_conflict

iptc-media/health/diseases_and_conditions/illness

client-blocklists/Client List: Morgan Stanley KWs - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/Amazon KWs - EXCLUDE ALL 

client-blocklists/Client List: Becton Dickinson KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/CLIENT LIST: Nomura KWs 2021 - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Boeing KWs 2021- INCLUDE ANY

client-blocklists/Bed Bath & Beyond KWs - INCLUDE ANY

client-blocklists/Client List: Exxon Mobil  - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/GEICO KWs - INCLUDES ANY_4.26.21

client-blocklists/Client List: Microsoft KWs 2 - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/Client List: T. Rowe Price KWs - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/T. Rowe Price KWs - INCLUDES ANY

advertising/B2_Asian Content_legacyaux_8xg

advertising/B2_Automotive Interest 2.5.15_legacyaux_jqs

client-blocklists/HBO KWs - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/Ford/Lincoln KWs - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/ExxonMobil 03312021 KWs - INCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Bank of America KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

advertising/Flu, Sickness & Virus Content

client-blocklists/WaPo: Combined Disaster Keyword List - INCLUDES ANY

advertising/Coronavirus Content

client-blocklists/Blockist: Capitol Building Mob

client-blocklists/Client List: Eli Lily KWs - INCLUDES ANY

advertising/B2_Culture and Tradition_legacyaux_kfx

advertising/B2_Defense_legacyaux_yxn

advertising/B2_Disaster, Accident and Tragedy_legacyaux_758

client-blocklists/Client List: Purina KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

advertising/Qualcomm Custom KW - 5G

advertising/Citrix Mindfulness

advertising/B2_Government & Policy_legacyaux_mza

advertising/B2_Health and Beauty_legacyaux_3fv

advertising/Client Keywords: On Running

client-blocklists/BP KWs - INCLUDES ANY

advertising/B2_Diabetes_legacyaux_8R9

advertising/B2_Military_legacyaux_qoj

advertising/B2_Positive News_legacyaux_hlt

advertising/B2_Society_legacyaux_0cz

advertising/B2_Women's Beauty_legacyaux_9jv

client-blocklists/Client List: KPMG KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Client List: Novo Nordisk KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Client List: Siemens KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Client List: Cisco KWs - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/Client List: AT&T ALT KWs - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/Mercedes KWs - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/FX Excludes All Disney

client-blocklists/Client List: PMI KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Client List: Inpixon KWs - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/Client List: Boeing KWs - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/Client List: Aetna KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Client List: Navy Federal Credit Union NFCU KWs 2 - INCLUDES ANY - 12.23.20

client-blocklists/Client List: Google KWs - INCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Client List: AT&T KWs 2021 - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/Philip Morris KWs - INCLUDES ANY 

client-blocklists/Dupixent neg kws - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Capital One KWs 2 - INCLUDES ANY - 1.4.21

client-blocklists/Bank of America Merrill Lynch KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Google PG KWs - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/Chase KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Client List: Office Depot KWs - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/Client List: ETrade KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

prism://prism.query/site-articles-only,/national

National

The Washington Post's national news coverage. Get the latest national news, featuring national security, science and the courts. Read breaking national news headlines from across the U.S.

prism://prism.query/tag,magnet-coronavirus&limit=20

News and updates about the coronavirus pandemic: Cases in the US, death toll, what you need to know about the virus, how to prepare, how to get tested.