Albert Breer@AlbertBreer
NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said on a media conference call that owners discussed the start of camp and the season during a video conference today. Talks are ongoing with the NFLPA.

Analysis: New research explores how conservative media misinformation may have intensified the severity of the pandemic https://t.co/1EXYGQXftM

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) June 25, 2020

Isaac Bruce waited six years to be elected to the Hall of Fame, but he’ll have to wait another year to be enshrined, unfortunately https://t.co/hjy1b6MOqS

— Cameron DaSilva (@camdasilva) June 25, 2020

“It’s ideologue meets grifter”: How Bill Barr made Trumpism possible
Bill Barr is the most powerful law enforcement officer in the country. What does he want?

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/6/24/21281485/bill-barr-donald-trump-berman-doj-david-rohde

Last Friday, Attorney General Bill Barr announced that US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Geoffrey Berman, was “stepping down” from his position.

The announcement caught everyone by surprise, including Berman, who quickly denied that he had any plans to resign. But the following day Barr announced that Trump had dismissed Berman, putting an end to the bizarre standoff (though Trump, later in the day, claimed he was “not involved” in Berman’s firing).

In any other administration, the firing of a US attorney who had been conducting investigations of the president’s allies would be scandalous. But this is not a typical administration and this is not a typical Department of Justice. Under Barr, the DOJ has become a political instrument for the president. Whether it’s misleading the public about the Mueller report or using tear gas to disperse peaceful protesters so that Trump could stage a photo op, or trying to fire Berman, Barr has repeatedly sacrificed the dignity of his office in order to please his boss.

If you don’t know much about Barr’s history, it’s hard to make sense of his behavior. Having already served as AG under George H.W. Bush’s administration, Barr had a solid reputation as a serious guy. When he reemerged in 2018 as Trump’s pick for attorney general, he was widely seen as a creature of the Republican establishment, and his selection was “greeted with a measure of relief” within the DOJ, according to the New York Times.

But events since have shown him to be a more than willing accomplice in Trump’s slow-motion destruction of democratic norms. Which raises the question: Why has someone like Bill Barr given himself over to an aspiring authoritarian like Trump?

To get some answers, I reached out to David Rohde, an editor at the New Yorker who profiled Barr for the magazine back in January. Beyond the obvious questions, I wanted to know who Barr really is and what’s driving his political decision-making in this moment. As Rohde put it, Barr is “a culture warrior from the ’80s” who is “fully committed” to protecting Trump. We talk about the ideology animating Barr’s loyalty to Trump and why there’s no going back for him at this point.

A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

Sean Illing
What’s the most important thing people should know about William Barr?

David Rohde
I think the most important thing to understand is that he has one of the most extreme views of how powerful an American president should be.

Sean Illing
What does that mean?

David Rohde
It means that he does not believe that we should have three co-equal branches of government. He believes the president should be more powerful than Congress and the courts. In his mind, that’s the only thing that can keep the country safe when it is threatened by war, natural disaster, or economic collapse. He believes that is what the founders intended.

Sean Illing
I wonder why Barr’s radicalism wasn’t reflected in the commentary when he was first nominated by Trump. The conventional wisdom at the time was that he was a banal establishment type. Why do you think this was missed?

David Rohde
Barr has held these views consistently throughout his life. But he was seen as a traditionalist when Trump nominated him to be attorney general. In hindsight, it looks like the extremism of Barr’s views didn’t emerge during his first tenure as attorney general because the president he served then, George H. W. Bush, was a traditionalist. Bush had witnessed Nixon’s abuses and resignation. Bush accepted that the three branches were co-equal.

Working as attorney general for Donald Trump, obviously, is completely different. Trump is contemptuous of post-Watergate norms and of congressional and judicial oversight. Trump has enabled Barr to pursue his decades-long goal of increasing the power of the presidency. And Barr has enabled Trump to stonewall congressional investigations to an extent not seen since Nixon. It’s an ideologue meets grifter.

Sean Illing
But the idea of “checks and balances” is literally the basis of our constitutional system. Why does he find it so inadequate?

David Rohde
He believes that if you look at American history, it’s been the presidency that has been able to intervene when we’ve faced war or economic calamity or natural disaster. And Congress has dithered and the courts simply don’t have the mechanisms to respond. He really believes this in his bones.

In fact, I just spoke to someone who knows him well, who works closely with him, and he told me that Barr is fully committed, that he stands by every action he’s taken in this administration, from clearing Lafayette Park with tear gas to trying to fire the US attorney in Manhattan this weekend. And this person said that Barr is doing these actions because he himself believes in empowering the presidency. It is not because he’s being pressured or bullied by Trump.

Sean Illing
So he’s a real ideological warrior?

David Rohde
Yes, he’s fully committed. And if you pay attention to what he’s been saying for decades, nothing he’s doing now is all that surprising. He’s been calling for tough law-and-order policies for a long time. His reaction to the demonstrations in Washington was nothing new.

When the Rodney King riots erupted in the 1990s, Barr was attorney general for George H.W. Bush. He sent thousands of federal agents out to Los Angeles to put down the riots and saw it as a missed opportunity to crack down on gangs in Los Angeles. He agreed to bring charges against the officers who beat Rodney King, but he complained it was a missed opportunity and federal civil rights charges should have been brought against the gangs as well.

So the idea of dominating the streets, the idea of overwhelming force to bring order, is something he’s advocated for decades. It’s not something that he’s mouthing for Trump.

Sean Illing
The thing about Barr is that he’s sort of a quiet revolutionary, or at least that’s the way he comes across in your profile. He understands how power works and he’s willing to methodically transform the system from within.

David Rohde
Very much so. I mean, it’s funny watching interviews with him. He’s very measured in how he speaks, but what he is saying is very far right and deeply conservative across the board. And his actions are extraordinary, at times unprecedented, for an attorney general, from dispatching National Guard troops from multiple states all over DC, to setting up a command bunker where he oversaw all of that, to removing prosecutors and pushing for lower sentences for the president’s allies. He speaks carefully but his actions are anything but measured.

Sean Illing
How important is Barr’s Catholicism to his moral and political project?

David Rohde
I can’t read his mind and I can’t say for sure what role his faith plays, but he’s pretty open about what he believes and why he believes it. He has said things in the past that showed a kind of moral conservatism. He said, for example, that he thought crime was a result of moral failings, not poverty, at a Federalist Society symposium in the ’90s. He’s aggressively backed tough sentences in the past and today for drug crimes. And he feels that people who are religiously observant are mocked in popular culture and that practicing one’s religion consistently is under assault today by liberal elites in the United States.

Sean Illing
Barr gave a speech at Notre Dame in 2019 that most people are not aware of but it’s incredibly revealing. What stands out to me isn’t his religiosity but his profound hostility to secular culture, which he calls “organized destruction” and an engine of “moral relativism.” He really does see himself on the front lines of an epic religious and cultural struggle, doesn’t he?

David Rohde
Yeah, he does. And again, I just spoke today with someone who works closely with him. He told me that Barr is convinced that mail-in ballots are a source of mob rule, that he’s worried about mob rule in the US. He complains that tech companies, when they label the president’s tweets, are taking away the free press rights of conservatives. In other words, all of these banal conservative talking points you hear all the time — he really believes them. He’s a culture warrior from the ’80s, but he’s back in the position of attorney general 40 years later and fighting the same battles.

Sean Illing
The obsession with cultural decline is worth lingering on because it really does seem like the guiding motivation for Barr. In that Notre Dame speech, he basically blames every “social pathology” (from depression to suicide rates to violence and drug addiction) on secularism. Do you know what he means by that?

David Rohde
He argues that the founding fathers believed that for American democracy to succeed, Americans had to be religiously observant, because religion provides a mechanism for people to control their behavior and to not abuse their power, and so those moral guideposts should come from religion, not from the government itself. And he felt that the courts made a variety of decisions in the 1960s that produced a bunch of toxic social changes.

Sean Illing
What does he actually want? Does he want a theocracy?

David Rohde
No, he wants a presidential republic where the chief executive is judged in two ways: impeachment and reelection every four years. He sees federal judges declaring Trump’s travel ban illegal or independent counsels like Robert Mueller investigating the president as improper infringements on presidential power by the judicial and legislative branches. They’re denying the president his legitimate constitutional right to run the executive branch as he sees fit.

In a speech last fall at the Federalist Society, he said part of the reason he joined the Trump administration was to halt the weakening of the presidency that he felt was going on in the Trump era, that judges and Democrats in Congress were setting dangerous precedents that would leave the country with a powerless president who couldn’t hold the country together in a crisis.

Sean Illing
What I hear when I listen to him speak is someone who has decided that democracy is too problematic, that the culture has been hijacked, and that the only response is to exercise power from the top down.

David Rohde
Well, I think what Barr believes is that the Hollywood cultural elite is forcing cultural change that most Americans oppose, and that the news media and Hollywood together are exaggerating the number of liberals in the country. And I think he believes that liberals engage in the same sort of rough-and-tumble politics as Trump. So there’s a sense that this is a game for power and you either win or lose.

There’s a fierce belief among Barr and other administration officials that whatever Trump’s problems and behavioral issues, and there are lots of them, they still believe Trump is delivering on a conservative agenda. And one person close to Barr just basically replied, “Of course we support this president and of course we’re going to continue working for him.”

Sean Illing
And what decisions or what changes is Barr reacting against?

David Rohde
He cites Roe v. Wade as the primary example. And he blames a wide variety of social problems, from children born out of wedlock to drug addiction, on what he claims is an unremitting assault on religion and traditional values by militant secularists.

Sean Illing
Barr has this reputation as a very shrewd operator but it does seem like he’s misreading the room lately.

David Rohde
Clearing protesters from Lafayette Square and the attempt to remove Berman, the US attorney in New York, were both off politically. Barr mishandled them. I think that how Trump has responded to the pandemic and the George Floyd demonstrations gives me the sense that both Trump and Barr are off their game. The fact that Trump and Barr lost two major Supreme Court decisions last week, that Berman so openly defied Barr’s order to resign, shows that their political capital could be decreasing.

So there’s an argument that Trump and Barr are just out of touch with the sentiment of this country right now. As I was saying earlier, Barr is still mouthing the same “law and order” talking points you heard in the ’80s. And even in interviews now, Barr will acknowledge that racism exists but he rejects the idea that there’s systemic racism in this country. He clearly doesn’t feel the sense of urgency that so many Americans feel.

Sean Illing
For better or worse, Barr sees this moment as his last stand, right?There’s no going back at this point.

David Rohde
He’s all in. Again, the person I spoke to who’s close to Barr says he really believes what he’s doing is right. And friends of Barr have told me that none of these views are new. And he has nothing to lose. He’s had a long, successful career. Nothing is more important to him than this right now. And I was told today Barr will absolutely be serving through the November election and the remainder of Trump’s term. He is fully committed to seeing this through.

zn wrote:

from https://theramswire.usatoday.com/2020/06/24/nfl-rams-roster-rank-espn-pff/

ESPN doesn’t see the Rams as having one of the best rosters in football. ESPN used Pro Football Focus’ advanced statistics and grades to rank every roster in the NFL, and the Rams came in at No. 22.

The whole ESPN Insider bit on the Rams:

===

from https://www.espn.com/nfl/insider/story/_/id/29323823/2020-nfl-roster-rankings-all-32-teams-ravens-first-jaguars-last

22. Los Angeles Rams

Biggest strength: In a shocker, the best player in the NFL is the biggest strength on this roster. Aaron Donald has broken the scale for interior defenders over the course of his career. He has 60 more pressures than any other defender over the past three years, and he has done that on the inside while being double- and triple-teamed more than any other defensive lineman in the league. As long as the Rams have him in the middle, their pass rush is in good shape.

Biggest weakness: The Rams lack experience at linebacker in a major way. Micah Kiser and Travin Howard are listed as the starters here, but the two have combined for just 103 defensive snaps in the NFL and both were drafted in the fifth round or later in the 2018 draft. There are other options — including Troy Reeder and Kenny Young — but none of those guys gets you excited. It will have to be a committee approach to replace the production that Cory Littleton gave the defense, particularly in coverage.

X factor for 2020: The Rams’ offensive line went from a strength in 2018 to one of the lowest-graded units in the NFL this past season. Yes, there were injuries that played a role, but Rob Havenstein’s play fell off a cliff (50.9 overall grade in 2019) and the losses of starters Rodger Saffold and John Sullivan played a big role too. With how reliant quarterback Jared Goff has been on being able to operate from a clean pocket early in his career, they’ll need major improvements from the group up front if they hope to compete in a competitive NFC West.

Coronavirus Live Updates: U.S. Cases Near Record Level as Virus Surges in South and West
New cases in the U.S. have reached their highest daily level since April.
link https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/world/coronavirus-updates.html

==

New coronavirus cases in the U.S. soar to highest single-day total
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/06/24/coronavirus-live-updates-us/

==

New York imposes quarantine on nine US states
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53167780

New York, New Jersey and Connecticut have asked people travelling from states where virus cases are rising to go into self-isolation for 14 days.

==

‘The explosion has to slow down’: Texas hospitals on edge as coronavirus cases surge
“It’s not like I can triple my capacity overnight because we have a lot of other patients,” said a hospital administrator in Houston.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/explosion-has-slow-down-texas-hospitals-edge-coronavirus-cases-surge-n1232053

A story broke about Ben Roethlisberger sharing a story of his struggles with certain demons during a Christian Conference zoom call. I was asked about it today, & it was one of those moments that I knew was bigger than football.. here’s how I answered. pic.twitter.com/4eoDX9593a

— Ryan Clark (@Realrclark25) June 24, 2020

Honestly, all that was missing was a tin foil hat https://t.co/PF7Ob8z3M6

— trey wingo (@wingoz) June 24, 2020

Russell Wilson on the Seahawks pic.twitter.com/wwpKAKtIh8

— HoldenCantor (@HoldenCantor) June 24, 2020

from https://theramswire.usatoday.com/2020/06/24/nfl-rams-roster-rank-espn-pff/

ESPN doesn’t see the Rams as having one of the best rosters in football. ESPN used Pro Football Focus’ advanced statistics and grades to rank every roster in the NFL, and the Rams came in at No. 22.

Aaron Donald and the pass rush was highlighted as the team’s biggest strength, while L..A.’s inexperienced linebacker unit was named its biggest weakness. The X-factor is the offensive line, given the importance of it and the struggles it endured last year.

X factor for 2020: The Rams’ offensive line went from a strength in 2018 to one of the lowest-graded units in the NFL this past season. Yes, there were injuries that played a role, but Rob Havenstein’s play fell off a cliff (50.9 overall grade in 2019) and the losses of starters Rodger Saffold and John Sullivan played a big role, too. With how reliant quarterback Jared Goff has been on being able to operate from a clean pocket early in his career, they’ll need major improvements from the group up front if they hope to compete in a competitive NFC West.

How Exactly Do You Catch Covid-19? There Is a Growing Consensus
Surface contamination and fleeting encounters are less of a worry than close-up, person-to-person interactions for extended periods

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-exactly-do-you-catch-covid-19-there-is-a-growing-consensus-11592317650?fbclid=IwAR0fXjVEGJNUrd_DTKV2CTre_iIIihxOMFX2-fWAPkeE0EB6nX2m0My5h0U

Six months into the coronavirus crisis, there’s a growing consensus about a central question: How do people become infected?

It’s not common to contract Covid-19 from a contaminated surface, scientists say. And fleeting encounters with people outdoors are unlikely to spread the coronavirus.

Instead, the major culprit is close-up, person-to-person interactions for extended periods. Crowded events, poorly ventilated areas and places where people are talking loudly—or singing, in one famous case—maximize the risk.

These emerging findings are helping businesses and governments devise reopening strategies to protect public health while getting economies going again. That includes tactics like installing plexiglass barriers, requiring people to wear masks in stores and other venues, using good ventilation systems and keeping windows open when possible.

Two recent large studies showed that wide-scale lockdowns—stay-at-home orders, bans on large gatherings and business closures—prevented millions of infections and deaths around the world. Now, with more knowledge in hand, cities and states can deploy targeted interventions to keep the virus from taking off again, scientists and public-health experts said.

That means better protections for nursing-home residents and multigenerational families living in crowded conditions, they said. It also means stressing physical distancing and masks, and reducing the number of gatherings in enclosed spaces.

“We should not be thinking of a lockdown, but of ways to increase physical distance,” said Tom Frieden, chief executive of Resolve to Save Lives, a nonprofit public-health initiative. “This can include allowing outside activities, allowing walking or cycling to an office with people all physically distant, curbside pickup from stores, and other innovative methods that can facilitate resumption of economic activity without a rekindling of the outbreak.”

The group’s reopening recommendations include widespread testing, contact tracing and isolation of people who are infected or exposed.

A Recipe for Infection
Getting the Covid-19 virus involves three steps.

1 Coughing, talking and breathing creates virus-carrying droplets of various sizes.

2 Enough virus has to make itself over to you or build up around you over time to trigger an infection.

3 The virus has to make its way into your respiratory tract and use the ACE-2 receptors there to enter cells and replicate.

One important factor in transmission is that seemingly benign activities like speaking and breathing produce respiratory bits of varying sizes that can disperse along air currents and potentially infect people nearby.

Health agencies have so far identified respiratory-droplet contact as the major mode of Covid-19 transmission. These large fluid droplets can transfer virus from one person to another if they land on the eyes, nose or mouth. But they tend to fall to the ground or on other surfaces pretty quickly.

Some researchers say the new coronavirus can also be transmitted through aerosols, or minuscule droplets that float in the air longer than large droplets. These aerosols can be directly inhaled.

That’s what may have happened at a restaurant in Guangzhou, China, where an infected diner who was not yet ill transmitted the virus to five others sitting at adjacent tables. Ventilation in the space was poor, with exhaust fans turned off, according to one study looking at conditions in the restaurant.

Aerosolized virus from the patient’s breathing or speaking could have built up in the air over time and strong airflow from an air-conditioning unit on the wall may have helped recirculate the particles in the air, according to authors of the study, which hasn’t yet been peer-reviewed.

Sufficient ventilation in the places people visit and work is very important, said Yuguo Li, one of the authors and an engineering professor at the University of Hong Kong. Proper ventilation—such as forcing air toward the ceiling and pumping it outside, or bringing fresh air into a room—dilutes the amount of virus in a space, lowering the risk of infection.

Another factor is prolonged exposure. That’s generally defined as 15 minutes or more of unprotected contact with someone less than 6 feet away, said John Brooks, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s chief medical officer for the Covid-19 response. But that is only a rule of thumb, he cautioned. It could take much less time with a sneeze in the face or other intimate contact where a lot of respiratory droplets are emitted, he said.

Superspreaders

At a March 10 church choir practice in Washington state, 87% of attendees were infected, said Lea Hamner, an epidemiologist with the Skagit County public-health department and lead author of a study on an investigation that warned about the potential for “superspreader” events, in which one or a small number of people infect many others.

Members of the choir changed places four times during the 2½-hour practice, were tightly packed in a confined space and were mostly older and therefore more vulnerable to illness, she said. All told, 53 of 61 attendees at the practice were infected, including at least one person who had symptoms. Two died.

Several factors conspired, Ms. Hamner said. When singing, people can emit many large and small respiratory particles. Singers also breathe deeply, increasing the chance they will inhale infectious particles.

Similar transmission dynamics could be at play in other settings where heavy breathing and loud talking are common over extended periods, like gyms, musical or theater performances, conferences, weddings and birthday parties. Of 61 clusters of cases in Japan between Jan. 15 and April 4, many involved heavy breathing in close proximity, such as karaoke parties, cheering at clubs, talking in bars and exercising in gyms, according to a recent study in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases.

The so-called attack rate—the percentage of people who were infected in a specific place or time—can be very high in crowded events, homes and other spaces where lots of people are in close, prolonged contact.

An estimated 10% of people with Covid-19 are responsible for about 80% of transmissions, according to a study published recently in Wellcome Open Research. Some people with the virus may have a higher viral load, or produce more droplets when they breathe or speak, or be in a confined space with many people and bad ventilation when they’re at their most infectious point in their illness, said Jamie Lloyd-Smith, a University of California, Los Angeles professor who studies the ecology of infectious diseases.

But overall, “the risk of a given infected person transmitting to people is pretty low,” said Scott Dowell, a deputy director overseeing the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Covid-19 response. “For every superspreading event you have a lot of times when nobody gets infected.”

The attack rate for Covid-19 in households ranges between 4.6% and 19.3%, according to several studies. It was higher for spouses, at 27.8%, than for other household members, at 17.3%, in one study in China.

Rosanna Diaz lives in a three-bedroom apartment in New York City with five other family members. The 37-year-old stay-at-home mother was hospitalized with a stroke on April 18 that her doctors attributed to Covid-19, and was still coughing when she went home two days later.

She pushed to get home quickly, she said, because her 4-year-old son has autism and needed her. She kept her distance from family members, covered her mouth when coughing and washed her hands frequently. No one else in the apartment has fallen ill, she said. “Nobody went near me when I was sick,” she said.

Being outside is generally safer, experts say, because viral particles dilute more quickly. But small and large droplets pose a risk even outdoors, when people are in close, prolonged contact, said Linsey Marr, a Virginia Tech environmental engineering professor who studies airborne transmission of viruses.

No one knows for sure how much virus it takes for someone to become infected, but recent studies offer some clues. In one small study published recently in the journal Nature, researchers were unable to culture live coronavirus if a patient’s throat swab or milliliter of sputum contained less than one million copies of viral RNA.

Air travel is full of opportunities for coronavirus transmission. Touchless check-in, plexiglass shields, temperature checks, back-to-front boarding and planes with empty middle seats are all now part of the flying experience, and the future may bring even more changes. Illustration: Alex Kuzoian
“Based on our experiment, I would assume that something above that number would be required for infectivity,” said Clemens Wendtner, one of the study’s lead authors and head of the department of infectious diseases and tropical medicine at München Klinik Schwabing, a teaching hospital at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.

He and his colleagues found samples from contagious patients with virus levels up to 1,000 times that, which could help explain why the virus is so infectious in the right conditions: It may take much lower levels of virus than what’s found in a sick patient to infect someone else.

Changing policies

Based on this emerging picture of contagion, some policies are changing. The standard procedure for someone who tests positive is to quarantine at home. Some cities are providing free temporary housing and social services where people who are infected can stay on a voluntary basis, to avoid transmitting the virus to family members.

The CDC recently urged Americans to keep wearing masks and maintaining a distance from others as states reopen. “The more closely you interact with others, the longer the interaction lasts, the greater the number of people involved in the interaction, the higher the risk of Covid-19 spread,” said Jay Butler, the CDC’s Covid-19 response incident manager.

If the number of Covid-19 cases starts to rise dramatically as states reopen, “more extensive mitigation efforts such as what were implemented back in March may be needed again,” a decision that would be made locally, he said.

CDC guidelines for employers whose workers are returning include requiring masks, limiting use of public transit and elevators to reduce exposure, and prohibiting hugs, handshakes and fist-bumps. The agency also suggested replacing communal snacks, water coolers and coffee pots with prepacked, single-serve items, and erecting plastic partitions between desks closer than 6 feet apart.

Current CDC workplace guidelines don’t talk about distribution of aerosols, or small particles, in a room, said Lisa Brosseau, a respiratory-protection consultant for the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy.

“Aerosol transmission is a scary thing,” she said. “That’s an exposure that’s hard to manage and it’s invisible.” Ensuring infected individuals stay home is important, she said, but that can be difficult due to testing constraints. So additional protocols to interrupt spread, like social distancing in workspaces and providing N95 respirators or other personal protective equipment, might be necessary as well, she said.

Some scientists say while aerosol transmission does occur, it doesn’t explain most infections. In addition, the virus doesn’t appear to spread widely through the air.

“If this were transmitted mainly like measles or tuberculosis, where infectious virus lingered in the airspace for a long time, or spread across large airspaces or through air-handling systems, I think you would be seeing a lot more people infected,” said the CDC’s Dr. Brooks.

Sampling the air in high-traffic areas regularly could help employers figure out who needs to get tested, said Donald Milton, professor of environmental and occupational health at the University of Maryland School of Public Health.

“Let’s say you detect the virus during lunchtime on Monday in a dining hall,” he said. “You could then reach out to people who were there during that time telling them that they need to get tested.”

Erin Bromage, a University of Massachusetts Dartmouth associate professor of biology, has been fielding questions from businesses, court systems and even therapists after a blog post he wrote titled “The Risks—Know Them—Avoid Them” went viral.

Courts are trying to figure out how to reconvene safely given that juries normally sit close together, with attorneys speaking to them up close, Dr. Bromage said. Therapists want to be able to hold in-person counseling sessions again. And businesses are trying to figure out what types of cleaning and disease-prevention methods in which to invest most heavily.

He advises that while wiping down surfaces and putting in hand-sanitizer stations in workplaces is good, the bigger risks are close-range face-to-face interactions, and having lots of people in an enclosed space for long periods. High-touch surfaces like doorknobs are a risk, but the virus degrades quickly so other surfaces like cardboard boxes are less worrisome, he said. “Surfaces and cleaning are important, but we shouldn’t be spending half of our budget on it when they may be having only a smaller effect,” he said.

Drugmaker Eli Lilly & Co. has a medical advisory panel that’s reading the latest literature on viral transmission, which it is using to develop recommendations for bringing back the company’s own workers safely.

To go into production facilities, some of which are in operation now, scientists must don multiple layers of personal protective equipment, including gloves, masks, goggles and coveralls. That’s not abnormal for drug-development settings, said Lilly Chief Scientific Officer Daniel Skovronsky. “The air is extensively filtered. There’s lots of protection,” he said.

The places he worries about are the break rooms, locker rooms and security checkpoints, where people interact. Those are spaces where the company has instituted social-distancing measures by staggering the times they are open and how many people can be there at once. Only a few cafeterias are open, and those that are have socially distanced seating. In bathrooms, only half the stalls are available to cut down on the number of people.

“We’ll never be more open than state guidelines,” Dr. Skovronsky said, but “we’re often finding ourselves being more restrictive because we’re following the numbers.”

London Fletcher brought energy, passion, & grit to the field. He won a championship with the Rams but his Ram career will always have a “What if”. Fletcher would go on to play for 12 more seasons after St. Louis. He would be looked at as franchise legend if the Rams retained him pic.twitter.com/CMtf1K5mLF

— RAMS ON FILM (@RamsOnFilm) June 24, 2020

Dr. Anthony Fauci said it was “impossible to call” if football can be safely played in the fall https://t.co/vOLWW2lqYG

— ProFootballTalk (@ProFootballTalk) June 24, 2020