vox--2020-05-13--Call centers have never been more important — or more strapped

The Nevada unemployment office was about to close , and Shanay , a 26-year-old Las Vegas resident , had been on hold for nearly 11 hours .
More than five weeks earlier , she was laid off from her position as an administrative assistant at one of the city ’ s top resorts and casinos .
Her mom and stepdad — a guest room attendant and an employee at a floral business that largely serves hotels and conference centers — also lost their jobs as the Vegas strip went dark .
While all three filed claims promptly thereafter , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ store to fax ( yes , fax ) requested pay stubs , it soon became clear they would need to get someone on the phone to move their applications out of “ pending ” status .
Shanay knew hers wasn ’ t the only household in Las Vegas to see its income disappear practically overnight in response to the coronavirus pandemic — a third of the city ’ s workforce is employed in leisure and hospitality — but she didn ’ t expect calling unemployment to become her family ’ s new part-time @ @ @ @ @ @ @ up and readied their phones to start dialing at 8 am , only to be told , after 200 or 300 calls each , that the queue was full .
It wasn ’ t until April 22 that they finally connected .
When an exhausted voice at the call center picked up late in the evening , Shanay ’ s mom broke down in tears .
“ As soon as they answered , she started bawling , crying because she was just so relieved , ” she told Vox in late April .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ without pay .
We have savings .
But , you know , after a while it starts hurting.
” The problem plaguing millions of Americans struggling to get a hold of overburdened unemployment offices is the same that countless people have faced as they ’ ve tried to cancel plane tickets , defer credit card payments , and fix internet connections during the pandemic .
Just as demand has surged , the call centers meant to handle these queries have faced their own disruptions , leading to unprecedented delays .
Call centers have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ representatives to work from home Many call centers have scrambled to send thousands of customer service representatives to work from home for the first time , a process fraught with logistical and technical hurdles .
Others have continued to tell employees to come into the office — which they can do , since call centers have been designated as an essential service — but at reduced numbers .
A growing number have seen workers get sick with Covid-19 .
The Covid-19 crisis presents a set of challenges that almost no company was prepared @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the contact center market research firm DMG Consulting LLC .
When there ’ s a natural disaster , companies typically shift their operations to an overseas outsourcer or a site in another region of the US .
“ There ’ s no precedent for a business continuity plan where people have to be more than 6 feet away from each other , ” she says .
Relying on outsourcers has also proved to be a flawed strategy , as strict lockdowns have been imposed in India and the Philippines , the “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the countries ’ quarantine measures were announced in mid-March , the majority of the industry was forced to either go remote or close down .
Even large companies saw their business cut in half overnight as tens of thousands of employees were unable to work from home , lacking essentials like laptops , high-speed internet , and a secure way to access sensitive customer data .
Today , capacity is back up around 80 percent , according to the technology research firm ISG , but even reaching that has been a struggle .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ a service provider that said , ‘ I never knew what a dongle was , and I just had to order 10,000 of them.
’ So it ’ s even just getting people the hardware and the equipment that they need , ” says Melissa O ’ Brien , a vice president at HFS Research , a business services consultancy .
( Dongles , for the as-yet-uninitiated , are small , increasingly ubiquitous computer adapters . )
On the other end of the phone line , none of this is visible , though @ @ @ @ @ @ @ work from home alongside kids and pets .
Most people understand that customer service departments are inundated right now : An analysis by ListenFirst , a social media analytics company , found that while customer service-related tweets around grocery delivery apps skyrocketed in March , the share containing negative words or phrases actually fell .
For airlines and internet service providers , sentiment remained relatively stable even as volume spiked .
What ’ s changed is that the need is now more urgent than ever — and in a crisis , most people @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
In the early days of the pandemic , “ we saw a lot of people moving away from digital channels very quickly to the voice channel , trying to get certainty , assurances , empathy , making sure that they got commitments on the enterprise decision , ” says Merijn te Booij , chief marketing officer of Genesys , a contact center technology company .
“ What people don ’ t realize about contact centers is that they are the free psychological counseling centers in times of crisis , ” says Fluss @ @ @ @ @ @ @ they dump their fears and their concerns.
” More than 33 million people — or about one in five American workers — have filed for unemployment claims in the past seven weeks , according to the Department of Labor .
Desperate workers have placed hundreds of unanswered calls , spent hours on hold , and navigated archaic online systems that are buckling under the influx of traffic — and still , not everyone has been able to get through .
Leaha , a 26-year-old child care worker in Michigan , took a voluntary @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of bringing the virus home to her family , and has been trying to get in touch with the state unemployment agency almost ever since .
The agency ’ s live chat service is offline , and none of her calls have even been placed on hold , despite phoning more than 100 times per day .
“ I was like , ‘ Am I calling at the wrong time of the day ?
’ ” she says , “ but pretty much anytime between 8 and 6 I ’ ve been trying.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ , escalating travel restrictions , and a rapid shift to remote school and work have led to similar headaches across a wide range of industries .
In most cases , says O ’ Brien , the delays are coming , “ not just from the demand in contacts — people trying to get in touch with their bank or their insurer or find out when their order of toilet paper is coming in — but also just the fact that this major disruption has created [ fewer ] folks that are able to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ do so.
” Can ’ t these companies just , you know , hire more people ?
The staggering unemployment figures certainly suggest that call centers should have little trouble finding more workers to answer phones , respond to emails , and handle chat lines — but for many businesses , it ’ s not quite so simple .
Often , the companies that have been overwhelmed by calls and messages are the same ones facing massive revenue declines .
Airlines , travel agencies , and department stores have furloughed or laid off @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the crisis , and for them , staffing up generally isn ’ t an option .
This may be why , apart from banks and insurance providers , more companies weren ’ t expanding their customer service teams as the crisis escalated across the US .
According to Julia Pollak , a labor economist at the job marketplace ZipRecruiter , customer service job postings fell 16 percent in the week ending April 5 compared with four weeks prior .
The online travel company Expedia , which already cut about 3,000 jobs in February @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is expected to see bookings slashed by half this year .
Alexis Tiacoh , Expedia ’ s public relations manager , says the company has seen call volumes five to seven times higher than average , amounting to hundreds of thousands of calls beyond what it typically handles during its busiest season .
Often , the companies overwhelmed by calls and messages are the same ones facing massive revenue declines “ We know it has created challenges for everyone , and first and foremost , we want our customers to know we ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ might have experienced in trying to reach us , ” Tiacoh said .
The company has also shored up its self-service and virtual agent options and offers an online refund request form to free up phone lines for more complex problems .
Many businesses have also had to find more cost-effective alternatives to building an army of customer service reps .
This is partly why your inbox has likely seen a deluge of emails with subject lines like “ Checking in with our customers ” and “ An update from our CEO.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of overcommunicating if it means avoiding a backlog of individual queries .
Some have also reassigned employees from other areas of the company .
For example , 8x8 , a cloud communications software provider , works with one UK retailer that has recruited its sales associates to answer calls and respond to messages .
“ You think about retail , those employees are not on the shop floor anymore to be face to face with customers , ” says Janice Rapp , 8x8 ’ s vice president of product marketing .
Their skill @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in line for call center gigs .
In some pockets of the economy , companies are now on hiring sprees : The grocery delivery service Instacart has seen its business skyrocket in the wake of stay-at-home orders in the US and Canada , with order volume up 300 percent year-over-year in early April .
On top of adding 300,000 “ shoppers ” — the gig workers who pick out and deliver orders — the company is in the process of scaling up its customer service team to 18,000 people by this month , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
While a spokesperson says it expects the majority of these hires to stay on as permanent employees , to fill shorter-term roles , Instacart is working with companies like Hertz and Hilton , which have been hard hit in recent months as travel has ground to a near halt .
Unemployment offices were operating with skeleton crews prior to the pandemic because their head counts are tied to the unemployment rate , which sat at 3.5 % in February , a 50-year low .
As that figure has ballooned to nearly 15 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rate at closer to 20 percent — call centers have struggled to meet even a fraction of the demand .
Nevada , like most states , has promised to significantly scale up its capacity to answer these queries , but its efforts haven ’ t kept pace with job losses .
Its Department of Employment , Training and Rehabilitation , which until recently employed only 75 people , has seen as much as 90 times its usual call volume in recent weeks .
In Florida , meanwhile , the state ’ s Department @ @ @ @ @ @ @ percent of incoming calls as of mid-April , with an average wait time of more than six and a half hours , a local News 6 investigation found .
Since the end of March , the agency has spent more than $ 119 million on contracts to add thousands of call center workers and improve the technological infrastructure supporting the system .
Similar endeavors are underway in states like Michigan , Pennsylvania , New York , and Texas .
As much as states are ramping up these systems , they still need to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ make sure security measures are implemented , a process that experts say typically takes about two weeks for private companies .
Because of the complexity of unemployment laws and benefit programs , these systems can take months to become proficient in , according to a Department of Labor survey , so new recruits may have a hard time responding to questions efficiently .
Why aren ’ t all customer service agents working from home by now ?
Call centers are generally not well-designed environments for social distancing : Agents sit side by side @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , often sharing a desk between shifts .
At the same time , their jobs , at least in theory , are ultra-portable , requiring only a phone , a computer , and an internet connection .
By Fluss ’ s estimates , though , only about 5 percent of call centers were 100 percent work-from-home before the pandemic , while others may have had 10 percent of their agents working remotely .
The pandemic , then , has forced a massive shift for many companies , while prompting scrutiny toward those still @ @ @ @ @ @ @ where they might put themselves at risk .
“ Contact centers are petri dishes , ” says Fluss .
“ When one person gets a cold , you just hope that person stays home , and if they come in — because in a lot of cases , if you don ’ t come in , you don ’ t get paid , right ?
— then the whole shop gets sick.
” A Times investigation found that more than 230 employees of the telecom giant Spectrum , owned by Charter Communications , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ April 21 .
More than half are call center workers .
In response to outcry over the company ’ s labor practices during the pandemic — which reportedly included an initial policy prohibiting remote work — the New York Attorney General ’ s Office said it had opened an inquiry into the company .
In a statement , Charter spokesperson Andrew Russell pointed to the company ’ s Covid-19-related paid leave policy , which permits employees to take an additional three weeks off during the pandemic , and its pledge to raise its @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by 2022 , beginning with a $ 1.50-an-hour hike for customer service workers and field technicians .
Wells Fargo has likewise come under fire for not setting up more remote options for employees at its massive U.S. call centers , at least five of which have seen positive Covid-19 cases , according to news reports .
While the bank said it would send “ thousands ” of call center workers home in mid-April from its Des Moines and West Des Moines offices , where two employees and a cafeteria worker tested positive for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ locations said their offices only started transitioning agents to work remotely in the past two weeks .
One agent , AJ , who works at the bank ’ s Roanoke , Virginia location , says he ’ s been home since late March as he ’ s high-risk for the disease , but wasn ’ t able to get an answer from his supervisor about getting set up for remote work for over a month , nor were his colleagues in similar situations .
While Wells Fargo continued paying him his full wages @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ d rather have been able to use it to help customers — especially since now that he ’ s back on the job , the phone lines are swamped with hundreds of calls in the queue .
Hilary O ’ Byrne , a spokesperson for Wells Fargo , said in April the bank was working to add more remote work options : “ We continue to do all we can to expand our work-from-home capabilities , and we are in the process of equipping some contact center employees with the technology needed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ while still meeting customer and regulatory commitments.
” Financial institutions , health insurers , and other companies that handle sensitive customer data undoubtedly have more hurdles to jump over in order to move their customer service departments out of office , experts say , but the fact that so many have already done it since the start of the pandemic is evidence that it ’ s possible .
Toronto-Dominion Bank shifted almost all of its 9,500 call center employees across the U.S. and Canada to work-from-home last month to comply with social distancing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Verizon Communications Inc. had nearly 17,000 agents working remotely by late March , while Comcast ’ s chief technologist Tony Werner said on a March 30 call the company was targeting 90 % work-from-home among its call center employees .
At home , agents may have spotty internet or distracting background noise These transitions aren ’ t always smooth : At home , agents may have spotty internet or distracting background noise , supervisors need to figure out how to conduct ongoing training , and companies need to ensure they ’ re @ @ @ @ @ @ @ regulations — but for the most part , the adjustment isn ’ t dissimilar to what people across most industries have been facing .
One technical support agent in Oklahoma whose cable-internet call center moved almost all of its employees to work-from-home in early April says she ’ s considering going remote full time .
With the rest of the country trying to manage telecommuting and remote schooling , the call volume has been so high she ’ s been working 12- or 13-hour shifts with little downtime between calls .
The company @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a quiet room in which to work , she says , but during the pandemic , it has relaxed its rules .
“ Now we have talking points to say , ‘ You know , with everything going on , we ’ ve had to do work-from-home .
Sorry about this.
’ But [ most customers ] don ’ t expect it to be 100 percent quiet right now , because they know we ’ re kind of all in this together .
We ’ re all going through the same thing.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Twice a week , we ’ ll send you the best Goods stories exploring what we buy , why we buy it , and why it matters .
Every day at Vox , we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you , and our audience around the world , with information that has the power to save lives .
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The Nevada unemployment office was about to close, and Shanay, a 26-year-old Las Vegas resident, had been on hold for nearly 11 hours.
More than five weeks earlier, she was laid off from her position as an administrative assistant at one of the city’s top resorts and casinos. Her mom and stepdad — a guest room attendant and an employee at a floral business that largely serves hotels and conference centers — also lost their jobs as the Vegas strip went dark.
While all three filed claims promptly thereafter, and even waited in line at the UPS store to fax (yes, fax) requested pay stubs, it soon became clear they would need to get someone on the phone to move their applications out of “pending” status.
Shanay knew hers wasn’t the only household in Las Vegas to see its income disappear practically overnight in response to the coronavirus pandemic — a third of the city’s workforce is employed in leisure and hospitality — but she didn’t expect calling unemployment to become her family’s new part-time job.
Every weekday, they woke up and readied their phones to start dialing at 8 am, only to be told, after 200 or 300 calls each, that the queue was full. It wasn’t until April 22 that they finally connected. When an exhausted voice at the call center picked up late in the evening, Shanay’s mom broke down in tears.
“As soon as they answered, she started bawling, crying because she was just so relieved,” she told Vox in late April. “It’s been a month without pay. We have savings. But, you know, after a while it starts hurting.”
The problem plaguing millions of Americans struggling to get a hold of overburdened unemployment offices is the same that countless people have faced as they’ve tried to cancel plane tickets, defer credit card payments, and fix internet connections during the pandemic.
Just as demand has surged, the call centers meant to handle these queries have faced their own disruptions, leading to unprecedented delays.
Call centers have scrambled to send thousands of customer service representatives to work from home
Many call centers have scrambled to send thousands of customer service representatives to work from home for the first time, a process fraught with logistical and technical hurdles. Others have continued to tell employees to come into the office — which they can do, since call centers have been designated as an essential service — but at reduced numbers. A growing number have seen workers get sick with Covid-19.
The Covid-19 crisis presents a set of challenges that almost no company was prepared for, says Donna Fluss, president of the contact center market research firm DMG Consulting LLC. When there’s a natural disaster, companies typically shift their operations to an overseas outsourcer or a site in another region of the US. “There’s no precedent for a business continuity plan where people have to be more than 6 feet away from each other,” she says.
Relying on outsourcers has also proved to be a flawed strategy, as strict lockdowns have been imposed in India and the Philippines, the “call-center capitals of the world.” When the countries’ quarantine measures were announced in mid-March, the majority of the industry was forced to either go remote or close down. Even large companies saw their business cut in half overnight as tens of thousands of employees were unable to work from home, lacking essentials like laptops, high-speed internet, and a secure way to access sensitive customer data.
Today, capacity is back up around 80 percent, according to the technology research firm ISG, but even reaching that has been a struggle.
“I had a call yesterday with a service provider that said, ‘I never knew what a dongle was, and I just had to order 10,000 of them.’ So it’s even just getting people the hardware and the equipment that they need,” says Melissa O’Brien, a vice president at HFS Research, a business services consultancy. (Dongles, for the as-yet-uninitiated, are small, increasingly ubiquitous computer adapters.)
On the other end of the phone line, none of this is visible, though it may be audible as more representatives work from home alongside kids and pets. Most people understand that customer service departments are inundated right now: An analysis by ListenFirst, a social media analytics company, found that while customer service-related tweets around grocery delivery apps skyrocketed in March, the share containing negative words or phrases actually fell. For airlines and internet service providers, sentiment remained relatively stable even as volume spiked.
What’s changed is that the need is now more urgent than ever — and in a crisis, most people still tend to reach for the phone.
In the early days of the pandemic, “we saw a lot of people moving away from digital channels very quickly to the voice channel, trying to get certainty, assurances, empathy, making sure that they got commitments on the enterprise decision,” says Merijn te Booij, chief marketing officer of Genesys, a contact center technology company.
“What people don’t realize about contact centers is that they are the free psychological counseling centers in times of crisis,” says Fluss. “Often people call up and they dump their fears and their concerns.”
More than 33 million people — or about one in five American workers — have filed for unemployment claims in the past seven weeks, according to the Department of Labor. Desperate workers have placed hundreds of unanswered calls, spent hours on hold, and navigated archaic online systems that are buckling under the influx of traffic — and still, not everyone has been able to get through.
Leaha, a 26-year-old child care worker in Michigan, took a voluntary layoff in mid-March to lower the risk of bringing the virus home to her family, and has been trying to get in touch with the state unemployment agency almost ever since.
The agency’s live chat service is offline, and none of her calls have even been placed on hold, despite phoning more than 100 times per day.
“I was like, ‘Am I calling at the wrong time of the day?’” she says, “but pretty much anytime between 8 and 6 I’ve been trying.”
The ripple effects of record unemployment, escalating travel restrictions, and a rapid shift to remote school and work have led to similar headaches across a wide range of industries.
In most cases, says O’Brien, the delays are coming, “not just from the demand in contacts — people trying to get in touch with their bank or their insurer or find out when their order of toilet paper is coming in — but also just the fact that this major disruption has created [fewer] folks that are able to take phone calls and less time to do so.”
Can’t these companies just, you know, hire more people?
The staggering unemployment figures certainly suggest that call centers should have little trouble finding more workers to answer phones, respond to emails, and handle chat lines — but for many businesses, it’s not quite so simple.
Often, the companies that have been overwhelmed by calls and messages are the same ones facing massive revenue declines. Airlines, travel agencies, and department stores have furloughed or laid off millions of workers to conserve cash during the crisis, and for them, staffing up generally isn’t an option.
This may be why, apart from banks and insurance providers, more companies weren’t expanding their customer service teams as the crisis escalated across the US. According to Julia Pollak, a labor economist at the job marketplace ZipRecruiter, customer service job postings fell 16 percent in the week ending April 5 compared with four weeks prior.
The online travel company Expedia, which already cut about 3,000 jobs in February for reasons unrelated to the pandemic, is expected to see bookings slashed by half this year. Alexis Tiacoh, Expedia’s public relations manager, says the company has seen call volumes five to seven times higher than average, amounting to hundreds of thousands of calls beyond what it typically handles during its busiest season.
Often, the companies overwhelmed by calls and messages are the same ones facing massive revenue declines
“We know it has created challenges for everyone, and first and foremost, we want our customers to know we’re truly sorry for the difficulty they might have experienced in trying to reach us,” Tiacoh said. The company has also shored up its self-service and virtual agent options and offers an online refund request form to free up phone lines for more complex problems.
Many businesses have also had to find more cost-effective alternatives to building an army of customer service reps. This is partly why your inbox has likely seen a deluge of emails with subject lines like “Checking in with our customers” and “An update from our CEO.” Companies would rather err on the side of overcommunicating if it means avoiding a backlog of individual queries.
Some have also reassigned employees from other areas of the company. For example, 8x8, a cloud communications software provider, works with one UK retailer that has recruited its sales associates to answer calls and respond to messages.
“You think about retail, those employees are not on the shop floor anymore to be face to face with customers,” says Janice Rapp, 8x8’s vice president of product marketing. Their skill sets, though, put them first in line for call center gigs.
In some pockets of the economy, companies are now on hiring sprees: The grocery delivery service Instacart has seen its business skyrocket in the wake of stay-at-home orders in the US and Canada, with order volume up 300 percent year-over-year in early April.
On top of adding 300,000 “shoppers” — the gig workers who pick out and deliver orders — the company is in the process of scaling up its customer service team to 18,000 people by this month, from 1,200 at the beginning of March.
While a spokesperson says it expects the majority of these hires to stay on as permanent employees, to fill shorter-term roles, Instacart is working with companies like Hertz and Hilton, which have been hard hit in recent months as travel has ground to a near halt.
Unemployment offices were operating with skeleton crews prior to the pandemic because their head counts are tied to the unemployment rate, which sat at 3.5% in February, a 50-year low. As that figure has ballooned to nearly 15 percent — with economists estimating the true rate at closer to 20 percent — call centers have struggled to meet even a fraction of the demand.
Nevada, like most states, has promised to significantly scale up its capacity to answer these queries, but its efforts haven’t kept pace with job losses. Its Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation, which until recently employed only 75 people, has seen as much as 90 times its usual call volume in recent weeks.
In Florida, meanwhile, the state’s Department of Economic Opportunity could only answer 2 percent of incoming calls as of mid-April, with an average wait time of more than six and a half hours, a local News 6 investigation found. Since the end of March, the agency has spent more than $119 million on contracts to add thousands of call center workers and improve the technological infrastructure supporting the system. Similar endeavors are underway in states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York, and Texas.
As much as states are ramping up these systems, they still need to train new workers to navigate them and make sure security measures are implemented, a process that experts say typically takes about two weeks for private companies. Because of the complexity of unemployment laws and benefit programs, these systems can take months to become proficient in, according to a Department of Labor survey, so new recruits may have a hard time responding to questions efficiently.
Why aren’t all customer service agents working from home by now?
Call centers are generally not well-designed environments for social distancing: Agents sit side by side and back to back in close quarters, often sharing a desk between shifts. At the same time, their jobs, at least in theory, are ultra-portable, requiring only a phone, a computer, and an internet connection.
By Fluss’s estimates, though, only about 5 percent of call centers were 100 percent work-from-home before the pandemic, while others may have had 10 percent of their agents working remotely. The pandemic, then, has forced a massive shift for many companies, while prompting scrutiny toward those still compelling their employees to commute to offices where they might put themselves at risk.
“Contact centers are petri dishes,” says Fluss. “When one person gets a cold, you just hope that person stays home, and if they come in — because in a lot of cases, if you don’t come in, you don’t get paid, right? — then the whole shop gets sick.”
“Contact centers are petri dishes”
A Times investigation found that more than 230 employees of the telecom giant Spectrum, owned by Charter Communications, had tested positive for Covid-19 as of April 21. More than half are call center workers. In response to outcry over the company’s labor practices during the pandemic — which reportedly included an initial policy prohibiting remote work — the New York Attorney General’s Office said it had opened an inquiry into the company.
In a statement, Charter spokesperson Andrew Russell pointed to the company’s Covid-19-related paid leave policy, which permits employees to take an additional three weeks off during the pandemic, and its pledge to raise its starting wage to $20 an hour by 2022, beginning with a $1.50-an-hour hike for customer service workers and field technicians.
Wells Fargo has likewise come under fire for not setting up more remote options for employees at its massive U.S. call centers, at least five of which have seen positive Covid-19 cases, according to news reports. While the bank said it would send “thousands” of call center workers home in mid-April from its Des Moines and West Des Moines offices, where two employees and a cafeteria worker tested positive for the virus, some agents at other locations said their offices only started transitioning agents to work remotely in the past two weeks.
One agent, AJ, who works at the bank’s Roanoke, Virginia location, says he’s been home since late March as he’s high-risk for the disease, but wasn’t able to get an answer from his supervisor about getting set up for remote work for over a month, nor were his colleagues in similar situations. While Wells Fargo continued paying him his full wages during that time, he says he’d rather have been able to use it to help customers — especially since now that he’s back on the job, the phone lines are swamped with hundreds of calls in the queue.
Hilary O’Byrne, a spokesperson for Wells Fargo, said in April the bank was working to add more remote work options: “We continue to do all we can to expand our work-from-home capabilities, and we are in the process of equipping some contact center employees with the technology needed to perform their jobs from home, while still meeting customer and regulatory commitments.”
Financial institutions, health insurers, and other companies that handle sensitive customer data undoubtedly have more hurdles to jump over in order to move their customer service departments out of office, experts say, but the fact that so many have already done it since the start of the pandemic is evidence that it’s possible.
Toronto-Dominion Bank shifted almost all of its 9,500 call center employees across the U.S. and Canada to work-from-home last month to comply with social distancing guidelines. Among Spectrum’s competitors, Verizon Communications Inc. had nearly 17,000 agents working remotely by late March, while Comcast’s chief technologist Tony Werner said on a March 30 call the company was targeting 90% work-from-home among its call center employees.
At home, agents may have spotty internet or distracting background noise
These transitions aren’t always smooth: At home, agents may have spotty internet or distracting background noise, supervisors need to figure out how to conduct ongoing training, and companies need to ensure they’re staying on the right side of privacy regulations — but for the most part, the adjustment isn’t dissimilar to what people across most industries have been facing.
One technical support agent in Oklahoma whose cable-internet call center moved almost all of its employees to work-from-home in early April says she’s considering going remote full time. With the rest of the country trying to manage telecommuting and remote schooling, the call volume has been so high she’s been working 12- or 13-hour shifts with little downtime between calls.
The company is usually strict about ensuring agents have a quiet room in which to work, she says, but during the pandemic, it has relaxed its rules. “Now we have talking points to say, ‘You know, with everything going on, we’ve had to do work-from-home. Sorry about this.’ But [most customers] don’t expect it to be 100 percent quiet right now, because they know we’re kind of all in this together. We’re all going through the same thing.”
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vox--2020-05-13--The Wisconsin Supreme Court’s conservative majority strikes down state stay-home order

On Wednesday evening , Republicans on the Wisconsin Supreme Court issued a broad order striking down that state ’ s stay-at-home order , which was issued by the head of the state ’ s health department to prevent the spread of coronavirus .
Among other things , the court ’ s decision concludes that the state health department exceeded its authority by instructing people to stay at home , and by “ forbidding travel and closing businesses ” deemed nonessential .
The Court ’ s order was 4-3 , with Justice Brian Hagedorn , a Republican initially appointed to a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Scott Walker ( R ) , writing one of three dissenting opinions .
Justice Daniel Kelly , a lame duck who recently lost an election to retain his seat by nearly 11 points , cast the key fourth vote to strike down the stay-at-home order .
If not for a Wisconsin law that allows Kelly to serve until August , the stay-at-home order may well have been upheld .
The decision appears to be animated by the kind of political considerations that are more at home on conservative talk radio than in a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ last week , when a lawyer defending the stay-at-home order pointed out that there was recently an outbreak of coronavirus in Brown County , Wisconsin , Chief Justice Patience Roggensack dismissed the significance of that outbreak because it primarily impacted factory workers .
“ These were due to the meatpacking , though , ” Roggensack said .
“ That ’ s where Brown County got the flare .
It wasn ’ t just the regular folks in Brown County.
” At that same oral argument , Justice Rebecca Bradley compared the state ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ together and placing under guard all those of Japanese ancestry in assembly centers ’ during World War II.
” The majority opinion , by Chief Justice Roggensack , is not at all clear as to whether this decision takes effect immediately , or whether the stay-at-home order remains in effect for another week .
Roggensack also concludes that Andrea Palm , the head of the state ’ s health department , exceeded her lawful authority .
But then Roggensack ’ s opinion contains this extraordinary line : “ We do not define the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Stat .
§ 252.02 ( 3 ) , ( 4 ) and ( 6 ) because clearly Order 28 went too far.
” Thus , as Hagedorn notes in dissent , the majority opinion “ has failed to provide almost any guidance for what the relevant laws mean , and how our state is to govern through this crisis moving forward.
” Wisconsin now has no stay-at-home order preventing the spread of coronavirus — or maybe it does have such an order for just one more week .
And it is not at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ department still has to fight the spread of a pandemic .
Moreover , one consequence of the Court ’ s decision is that if Palm does want to take additional steps to fight the spread of a deadly disease , she will likely need to jump through a series of procedural hoops that , at best , take weeks to complete .
And her decisions can now be overridden by Republicans in the state legislature .
In the meantime , there is no court decision ordering coronavirus to stop spreading .
Wisconsin law @ @ @ @ @ @ @ extraordinarily broad power — or , at least , it did until today — to confront a public health crisis .
Among other things , the department may “ close schools and forbid public gatherings in schools , churches , and other places to control outbreaks and epidemics.
” It may “ issue orders ... for the control and suppression of communicable diseases , ” and these orders “ may be made applicable to the whole or any specified part of the state.
” And , on top of all that , an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ authorize and implement all emergency measures necessary to control communicable diseases.
” Yet the majority opinion in Wisconsin Legislature diminishes this power considerably by imposing procedural limits on Palm ’ s authority .
Much of Roggensack ’ s majority opinion rests on a distinction between “ rules ” and mere “ orders.
” The reason this distinction matters is that a mere “ order ” from a state agency can go into effect immediately , but a “ rule ” can take weeks or even months to promulgate .
Even under an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , a state agency must first draft a “ statement of the scope of the proposed emergency rule.
” That statement must be reviewed and approved by the governor and the state Department of Administration , and then appear in an official state publication that only publishes once a week .
After the statement is published , the agency must complete a 10-day waiting period before it is allowed to move forward , with no apparent way to waive this requirement .
And then the rule can be delayed even longer if certain @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a public hearing on the new rule .
Then the new rule can potentially be suspended by a legislative committee — which may require the agency to start this process all over again .
Nevertheless , the Court ’ s Republican majority concludes that Palm ’ s stay-at-home order exceeds her power to issue mere orders .
Under the Court ’ s decision , any order that applies to a class of people that “ is described in general terms , ” and that can be expanded to more individuals , must be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that new efforts to fight the coronavirus are likely to be delayed for weeks or more .
There are several problems with the Court ’ s conclusion , but the biggest one is that it is inconsistent with the text of the state ’ s public health law .
That law gives the health department the power to “ promulgate and enforce rules or issue orders for guarding against the introduction of any communicable disease into the state ” or “ for the control and suppression of communicable diseases , ” and it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ may be made applicable to the whole or any specified part of the state.
” Thus , the statute explicitly states that the health department may issue an “ order ” and not just a “ rule ” that is applicable to the entire state .
As Justice Rebecca Dallet notes in one of three dissenting opinions , the state legislature purposely added this language to the state ’ s public health law to expand the health department ’ s power to issue statewide orders .
“ Originally , ” Dallet writes , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ not allow for the issuance of orders ; DHS could only ‘ adopt and enforce rules and regulations.
’ ” And these rules had to comply with limits similar to the ones the state Supreme Court imposed in Wisconsin Legislature .
But “ in 1982 , at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic , the Legislature amended the [ public health law ] to explicitly include as part of DHS ’ s power the ability ‘ to issue orders ’ of statewide application.
” So the state legislature explicitly amended the law during @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the health department a broad power to issue statewide orders .
The Court ’ s decision in Wisconsin Legislature effectively nullifies that 1982 amendment .
Having stripped the state health department of much of its authority , and having done so in the middle of the pandemic , the majority opinion then descends into confusion .
For one thing , it is not at all clear if the Court ’ s decision takes effect immediately , or if it does not take effect for several days .
Although the Republican-controlled state legislature , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , requested a six-day stay of the Court ’ s decision , the majority opinion does not grant such a stay .
Nevertheless , Roggensack , who wrote the majority opinion , also wrote a separate concurring opinion where she states that “ although our declaration of rights is effective immediately , I would stay future actions to enforce our decision until May 20 , 2020.
” So it is unclear whether Roggensack voted to grant a stay or not .
She authored the majority opinion , which does not grant a stay @ @ @ @ @ @ @ concurring opinion saying that she “ would stay ” enforcement of the Court ’ s decision .
Roggensack ’ s decision to cast Schrödinger ’ s vote inspired an incredulous dissent from Justice Ann Walsh Bradley .
“ Assuming Chief Justice Roggensack is actually voting for a stay , as her concurrence seemingly indicates , there appear to be four votes for issuing a stay ( Chief Justice Roggensack and Justices Ann Walsh Bradley , Dallet , and Hagedorn ) , ” Bradley writes .
“ So , is there a stay or @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ t be both ways.
” Similarly , after Roggensack ’ s majority opinion concludes that the health department must use a “ rule ” and not a mere “ order ” if it wants to hand down something like the stay-at-home order , Roggensack then tacks on several additional pages concluding that the health department ’ s power to issue rules also must be limited .
That ’ s the section that concludes with a declaration that “ we do not define the precise scope of DHS authority.
” And it ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ write that the majority “ has failed to provide almost any guidance for what the relevant laws mean , and how our state is to govern through this crisis moving forward.
” This decision is a failure of democracy The plaintiff in this lawsuit is the Wisconsin state legislature , which is controlled by Republicans .
But the Wisconsin legislature is one of the most egregiously gerrymandered bodies in the nation .
In 2018 , Democratic candidates received 54 percent of the popular vote for the Wisconsin state Assembly , but Republicans won @ @ @ @ @ @ @ seats .
Similarly , it is likely that the reason the Court did not vote 4-3 to uphold Wisconsin ’ s stay-at-home order is that Justice-elect Jill Karofsky , who defeated Justice Kelly in an April election , has not yet taken her seat .
Because Kelly will continue to sit for months as a lame duck , the state health department has now been stripped of much of its power to fight a deadly virus .
Every day at Vox , we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , with information that has the power to save lives .
Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment : to empower you through understanding .
Vox ’ s work is reaching more people than ever , but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn .
Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation , but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles , videos , and podcasts at the quality and volume that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a contribution to Vox today .

On Wednesday evening, Republicans on the Wisconsin Supreme Court issued a broad order striking down that state’s stay-at-home order, which was issued by the head of the state’s health department to prevent the spread of coronavirus. Among other things, the court’s decision concludes that the state health department exceeded its authority by instructing people to stay at home, and by “forbidding travel and closing businesses” deemed nonessential.
The case is Wisconsin Legislature v. Palm.
The Court’s order was 4-3, with Justice Brian Hagedorn, a Republican initially appointed to a lower state court by former Gov. Scott Walker (R), writing one of three dissenting opinions. Justice Daniel Kelly, a lame duck who recently lost an election to retain his seat by nearly 11 points, cast the key fourth vote to strike down the stay-at-home order. If not for a Wisconsin law that allows Kelly to serve until August, the stay-at-home order may well have been upheld.
The decision appears to be animated by the kind of political considerations that are more at home on conservative talk radio than in a court of law. During oral arguments last week, when a lawyer defending the stay-at-home order pointed out that there was recently an outbreak of coronavirus in Brown County, Wisconsin, Chief Justice Patience Roggensack dismissed the significance of that outbreak because it primarily impacted factory workers.
“These were due to the meatpacking, though,” Roggensack said. “That’s where Brown County got the flare. It wasn’t just the regular folks in Brown County.”
At that same oral argument, Justice Rebecca Bradley compared the state’s stay-at-home order to “‘assembling together and placing under guard all those of Japanese ancestry in assembly centers’ during World War II.”
The majority opinion, by Chief Justice Roggensack, is not at all clear as to whether this decision takes effect immediately, or whether the stay-at-home order remains in effect for another week. Roggensack also concludes that Andrea Palm, the head of the state’s health department, exceeded her lawful authority. But then Roggensack’s opinion contains this extraordinary line: “We do not define the precise scope of DHS authority under Wis. Stat. § 252.02(3), (4) and (6) because clearly Order 28 went too far.”
Thus, as Hagedorn notes in dissent, the majority opinion “has failed to provide almost any guidance for what the relevant laws mean, and how our state is to govern through this crisis moving forward.” Wisconsin now has no stay-at-home order preventing the spread of coronavirus — or maybe it does have such an order for just one more week. And it is not at all clear which powers the state health department still has to fight the spread of a pandemic.
Moreover, one consequence of the Court’s decision is that if Palm does want to take additional steps to fight the spread of a deadly disease, she will likely need to jump through a series of procedural hoops that, at best, take weeks to complete. And her decisions can now be overridden by Republicans in the state legislature.
In the meantime, there is no court decision ordering coronavirus to stop spreading.
State law gives Palm broad authority to fight a pandemic
Wisconsin law gives the state Department of Health Services extraordinarily broad power — or, at least, it did until today — to confront a public health crisis.
Among other things, the department may “close schools and forbid public gatherings in schools, churches, and other places to control outbreaks and epidemics.” It may “issue orders ... for the control and suppression of communicable diseases,” and these orders “may be made applicable to the whole or any specified part of the state.” And, on top of all that, an additional provision permits the health department to “authorize and implement all emergency measures necessary to control communicable diseases.”
Yet the majority opinion in Wisconsin Legislature diminishes this power considerably by imposing procedural limits on Palm’s authority. Much of Roggensack’s majority opinion rests on a distinction between “rules” and mere “orders.”
The reason this distinction matters is that a mere “order” from a state agency can go into effect immediately, but a “rule” can take weeks or even months to promulgate. Even under an expedited process for “emergency” rules, a state agency must first draft a “statement of the scope of the proposed emergency rule.” That statement must be reviewed and approved by the governor and the state Department of Administration, and then appear in an official state publication that only publishes once a week.
After the statement is published, the agency must complete a 10-day waiting period before it is allowed to move forward, with no apparent way to waive this requirement. And then the rule can be delayed even longer if certain legislative leaders require the agency to hold a public hearing on the new rule. Then the new rule can potentially be suspended by a legislative committee — which may require the agency to start this process all over again.
Nevertheless, the Court’s Republican majority concludes that Palm’s stay-at-home order exceeds her power to issue mere orders. Under the Court’s decision, any order that applies to a class of people that “is described in general terms,” and that can be expanded to more individuals, must be issued as a rule. That means that new efforts to fight the coronavirus are likely to be delayed for weeks or more.
There are several problems with the Court’s conclusion, but the biggest one is that it is inconsistent with the text of the state’s public health law. That law gives the health department the power to “promulgate and enforce rules or issue orders for guarding against the introduction of any communicable disease into the state” or “for the control and suppression of communicable diseases,” and it provides that “any rule or order may be made applicable to the whole or any specified part of the state.”
Thus, the statute explicitly states that the health department may issue an “order” and not just a “rule” that is applicable to the entire state.
As Justice Rebecca Dallet notes in one of three dissenting opinions, the state legislature purposely added this language to the state’s public health law to expand the health department’s power to issue statewide orders. “Originally,” Dallet writes, the state public health law “did not allow for the issuance of orders; DHS could only ‘adopt and enforce rules and regulations.’” And these rules had to comply with limits similar to the ones the state Supreme Court imposed in Wisconsin Legislature.
But “in 1982, at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, the Legislature amended the [public health law] to explicitly include as part of DHS’s power the ability ‘to issue orders’ of statewide application.” So the state legislature explicitly amended the law during a previous public health crisis to give the health department a broad power to issue statewide orders. The Court’s decision in Wisconsin Legislature effectively nullifies that 1982 amendment.
The Court’s decision is incompetently drafted
Having stripped the state health department of much of its authority, and having done so in the middle of the pandemic, the majority opinion then descends into confusion.
For one thing, it is not at all clear if the Court’s decision takes effect immediately, or if it does not take effect for several days.
Although the Republican-controlled state legislature, which is the plaintiff in this case, requested a six-day stay of the Court’s decision, the majority opinion does not grant such a stay. Nevertheless, Roggensack, who wrote the majority opinion, also wrote a separate concurring opinion where she states that “although our declaration of rights is effective immediately, I would stay future actions to enforce our decision until May 20, 2020.”
So it is unclear whether Roggensack voted to grant a stay or not. She authored the majority opinion, which does not grant a stay. But she also wrote a vague concurring opinion saying that she “would stay” enforcement of the Court’s decision.
Roggensack’s decision to cast Schrödinger’s vote inspired an incredulous dissent from Justice Ann Walsh Bradley. “Assuming Chief Justice Roggensack is actually voting for a stay, as her concurrence seemingly indicates, there appear to be four votes for issuing a stay (Chief Justice Roggensack and Justices Ann Walsh Bradley, Dallet, and Hagedorn),” Bradley writes. “So, is there a stay or isn’t there? It can’t be both ways.”
Similarly, after Roggensack’s majority opinion concludes that the health department must use a “rule” and not a mere “order” if it wants to hand down something like the stay-at-home order, Roggensack then tacks on several additional pages concluding that the health department’s power to issue rules also must be limited. That’s the section that concludes with a declaration that “we do not define the precise scope of DHS authority.” And it’s the section that inspired Hagedorn to write that the majority “has failed to provide almost any guidance for what the relevant laws mean, and how our state is to govern through this crisis moving forward.”
This decision is a failure of democracy
The plaintiff in this lawsuit is the Wisconsin state legislature, which is controlled by Republicans. But the Wisconsin legislature is one of the most egregiously gerrymandered bodies in the nation. In 2018, Democratic candidates received 54 percent of the popular vote for the Wisconsin state Assembly, but Republicans won 63 of the body’s 99 seats.
Similarly, it is likely that the reason the Court did not vote 4-3 to uphold Wisconsin’s stay-at-home order is that Justice-elect Jill Karofsky, who defeated Justice Kelly in an April election, has not yet taken her seat.
Because Kelly will continue to sit for months as a lame duck, the state health department has now been stripped of much of its power to fight a deadly virus.


vox--2020-05-13--What we know about the new Covid-19-linked illness in children

Doctors in 15 US states are reporting that at least 164 children have fallen sick with a rare inflammatory illness similar to a condition known as Kawasaki disease .
Symptoms include fever and inflammation and can affect organs , including the heart .
Some of the children have tested positive for Covid-19 or have antibodies to the virus , and three have died .
New York state has reported 102 cases of the pediatric inflammatory syndrome so far , with 29 percent of the cases involving children between the ages of 5 and 9 and 28 percent between the ages @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the illness have also popped up in other Covid-19 hot spots , including California , New Jersey , and Illinois .
The potentially deadly syndrome is also affecting a small number of children in other countries , including the UK , Spain , and now Italy .
A new peer-reviewed study out of Italy , published Wednesday in The Lancet , details the cases of 10 children who presented with this condition during the Covid-19 outbreak there .
Eight of the 10 children tested positive for the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes Covid-19 in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ provides the first clear evidence of a link between SARS-CoV-2 infection and this inflammatory condition , and we hope it will help doctors around the world as we try to get to grips with this unknown virus , ” said Lorenzo D ’ Antiga , lead author of the study from the Hospital Papa Giovanni XXIII in Bergamo , Italy , in a statement .
This work — and other ongoing research — aims to decipher what about the new coronavirus might trigger this serious condition , how to treat it , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ virus itself better .
Originally observed in Japan in the 1960s , Kawasaki disease is triggered by high levels of inflammation and can lead to trouble in the blood vessels and heart , among other places in the body , and occasionally prompt toxic shock syndrome and death .
Traditional symptoms can include a persistent high fever , skin rash , pinkeye , swollen hands and feet , and cracked lips .
There is no test for the condition , so doctors rely on these signs and other laboratory measurements to determine if @ @ @ @ @ @ @ It is primarily a pediatric condition , although adults can get it too . )
When Kawasaki disease is identified and addressed promptly , it is usually treatable .
Doctors typically administer antibody treatment and sometimes steroids and other medications , such as aspirin .
And , fortunately , Kawasaki disease is usually very rare , normally striking only about 21 children under the age of 5 per 100,000 in the US each year .
But now doctors are seeing a spike in cases of a similar illness — especially in areas with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ early reports suggest these patients have more severe illnesses than the average case .
How the new cases seem to be different The authors of the new study in The Lancet are calling the illness the “ Kawasaki-like disease , ” acknowledging that they are very early in understanding it — and how it is related to Covid-19 .
Experts in the US are calling the condition “ pediatric multi-system inflammatory syndrome potentially associated with Covid-19.
” CNN reports that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will provide “ a working case @ @ @ @ @ @ @ alert warning doctors to be on the lookout for the illness .
In the 10 patients in Italy , doctors found antibodies to the virus in eight of the children — three of whom also had a current infection .
The authors also noted they suspect that at least one of the other two might have had false negative antibody results due to testing issues .
As part of the analysis , the authors compared the recent pandemic cases with the records of the 19 patients with the condition that they treated over @ @ @ @ @ @ @ study was small , they found some key patterns that distinguished the pandemic patients from others with Kawasaki disease in years past .
One key difference is that the recent patients tended to be sicker than those seen before the new coronavirus reached the area .
Typically about 10 percent of Kawasaki patients had heart issues ( as detected by abnormal echocardiograms ) , whereas 60 percent of the pandemic cases did .
The newer patients were also more likely to have a severe inflammatory response known as mitochondrial activation syndrome , which @ @ @ @ @ @ @ note , “ is a form of cytokine storm.
” ( Cytokine storms are extreme immune reactions in the body , which have been fingered as culprits as much of the damage seen in critical adult Covid-19 patients . )
The doctors also found they needed to treat the recent patients with more medications to help them recover .
The children diagnosed during the outbreak also tended to be older ( a mean age of 7.5 years ) than kids they usually treated for the illness ( who had a mean age of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Kawasaki disease is usually tracked for children younger than 5 .
But in this new group , the patients ranged in age from 5.5 to 16 years old .
How is this inflammatory disease linked to Covid-19 ?
Despite having studied Kawasaki disease for decades , researchers still don ’ t know exactly what triggers it .
Even before Covid-19 , a working hypothesis has been that a runaway immune response — possibly combined with a genetic predisposition — brought it on .
Previous research had even looked for evidence of other coronaviruses @ @ @ @ @ @ @ evidence was generally only weakly correlated .
The new patterns emerging in places with severe outbreaks of Covid-19 , however , are significant .
And even though the Italian study was small , the researchers noted that the rate of Kawasaki-like cases at their hospital in the outbreak center of Bergamo had jumped 30 times to their usual rate in the month they studied .
The timing is also interesting to researchers .
“ If you look at the curves , Covid-19 has plateaued , but there ’ s an exponential rise in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” Jane Newburger , a cardiologist at Boston Children ’ s Hospital , said in a release .
“ It is even possible that the antibodies that children are making to SARS-CoV-2 are creating an immune reaction in the body .
Nobody knows.
” In addition to getting a clearer understanding of how the illness might be triggered by the new virus , researchers are also interested in how this could clarify some outstanding questions about the virus itself — and how we might fight it in the broader population .
For example @ @ @ @ @ @ @ phenomenon , there might be implications for vaccine studies , and this might also explain why some children become very ill with Covid-19 , while the majority are unaffected or asymptomatic , ” write Russell Viner , president of the Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health , and Elizabeth Whittaker , secretary of the British Pediatric Allergy Immunity and Infection Group , in a related commentary in The Lancet .
So far , at least three children have been reported to have died from this inflammatory illness in New York state .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ have since recovered enough to be released from the hospital , although they were still taking medicine at the time of publication .
And the researchers say they are scheduled to all have ECGs to check their heart function in the next couple of months .
Still , the researchers argue that the findings reveal a key potential consequence of Covid-19 infections in children .
“ The association between SARS-CoV-2 and Kawasaki-like disease should be taken into account when it comes to considering social reintegration policies for the pediatric population , ” the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ committee hearing Tuesday , Dr. Anthony Fauci , director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases , also remarked that there are many unknowns with Covid-19 , “ particularly when it comes to children ... We really have to be very careful because the more and more we learn , we ’ re seeing what this virus can do.
” But doctors underscore that despite the increased incidence of the pediatric syndrome , it is still quite rare , “ probably affecting no more than one in 1,000 children exposed to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
And thus far , children have generally recovered from this illness .
“ The good news is that , like Kawasaki disease , almost all the kids are treatable , ” Charles Schleien , New York ’ s Northwell Health pediatrics chair , told USA Today .
“ It ’ s highly likely that , with treatment , they ’ re going to be fine.
” Every day at Vox , we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you , and our audience around the world , with information @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment : to empower you through understanding .
Vox ’ s work is reaching more people than ever , but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn .
Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation , but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles , videos , and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires .
Please consider making a contribution to @ @ @

Doctors in at least 20 US states have seen kids who have fallen sick with a rare inflammatory illness similar to a condition known as Kawasaki disease. Symptoms include fever and inflammation and can affect organs, including the heart. The majority of the children have tested positive for Covid-19 or antibodies to the virus, and three have died.
More from CDC briefing on Kawasaki-like condition MIS-C: 1) Now in 20 states 2) Symptoms include stomach pain, vomiting, rash, fever 3) Respiratory symptoms rare 4) MIS-C requires immediate attention and likely hospitalization 5) No underlying conditions predispose kids to MIS-C. — Matt McCarthy (@DrMattMcCarthy) May 20, 2020
New York City alone has reported 147 cases of the pediatric inflammatory syndrome so far, with about a third of cases occurring in children younger than 5, and about half between the ages of 5 and 14.
Clusters of the illness have also popped up in other Covid-19 hot spots, including California, New Jersey, and Illinois. The potentially deadly syndrome is also affecting a small number of children in other countries, including the UK, Spain, and now Italy.
A peer-reviewed study out of Italy, published May 13 in The Lancet, details the cases of 10 children who presented with this condition during the Covid-19 outbreak there. Eight of the 10 children tested positive for the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes Covid-19 in an antibody test.
“Our study provides the first clear evidence of a link between SARS-CoV-2 infection and this inflammatory condition, and we hope it will help doctors around the world as we try to get to grips with this unknown virus,” said Lorenzo D’Antiga, lead author of the study from the Hospital Papa Giovanni XXIII in Bergamo, Italy, in a statement.
Lauren Henderson, an attending physician at Boston Children’s Hospital and assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, called it, “a very important study.”
This work — and other ongoing research — aims to decipher what about the new coronavirus might trigger this serious condition, how to treat it, and how it might help us understand the virus itself better.
What is Kawasaki disease?
Originally observed in Japan in the 1960s, Kawasaki disease is triggered by high levels of inflammation and can lead to trouble in the blood vessels and heart, among other places in the body, and occasionally prompt toxic shock syndrome and death.
Traditional symptoms can include a persistent high fever, skin rash, pinkeye, swollen hands and feet, and cracked lips. There is no test for the condition, so doctors rely on these signs and other laboratory measurements to determine if a child likely has it. (It is primarily a pediatric condition, although adults can get it too.)
When Kawasaki disease is identified and addressed promptly, it is usually treatable. Doctors typically administer antibody treatment and sometimes steroids and other medications, such as aspirin.
And, fortunately, Kawasaki disease is usually very rare, normally striking only about 21 children under the age of 5 per 100,000 in the US each year.
But now doctors are seeing a spike in cases of a similar illness — especially in areas with recent or ongoing Covid-19 outbreaks. And early reports suggest these patients have more severe illnesses than the average case.
How the new cases seem to be different
The authors of the new study in The Lancet are calling the illness the “Kawasaki-like disease,” acknowledging that they are very early in understanding it — and how it is related to Covid-19. Experts in the US are calling the condition “multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children”; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a working definition of the condition and recommendations to clinicians May 14.
In the 10 patients in Italy, doctors found antibodies to the virus in eight of the children — three of whom also had a current infection. The authors also noted they suspect that at least one of the other two might have had false negative antibody results due to testing issues.
As part of the analysis, the authors compared the recent pandemic cases with the records of the 19 patients with the condition that they treated over the past five years. Although the study was small, they found some key and worrisome patterns that distinguished the pandemic patients from others with Kawasaki disease in years past.
One key difference is “the patients with [this illness] and Covid-19 were sicker and had different lab test abnormalities” than those seen before the new coronavirus reached the area, Henderson told Vox. “This tells us that the children with Kawasaki disease features and Covid-19 might not be exactly like other more classical Kawasaki disease patients.”
For example, the researchers found that typically about 10 percent of their previous Kawasaki patients had heart issues (as detected by abnormal echocardiograms), whereas 60 percent of the pandemic cases did.
The newer patients were also more likely to have a severe inflammatory response known as mitochondrial activation syndrome, which, as the authors of the paper note, “is a form of cytokine storm.” (Cytokine storms are extreme immune reactions in the body, which have been fingered as culprits as much of the damage seen in critical adult Covid-19 patients.)
The doctors also found they needed to treat the recent patients with more medications to help them recover.
The children diagnosed during the outbreak also tended to be older (a mean age of 7.5 years) than kids they usually treated for the illness (who had a mean age of 3 years). In fact, Kawasaki disease is usually tracked for children younger than 5. But in this new group, the patients ranged in age from 5.5 to 16 years old.
Treatment, however, seems to work similarly for both conditions. A new report, published in the American Heart Association journal Circulation, shows that patients with the new illness seem to be responding well to the traditional treatments for Kawasaki disease: antibody therapy, sometimes combined with steroids.
The researchers looked at the treatment history for 35 pediatric patients (ages 2-16) admitted to the ICU with symptoms of the inflammatory conditions in France and Switzerland during the Covid-19 pandemic. After being given the standard treatment, all of the children described in the report survived — and “the majority of patients recovered within a few days,” the researchers noted in the paper.
How is this inflammatory disease linked to Covid-19?
Despite having studied Kawasaki disease for decades, researchers still don’t know exactly what triggers it. Even before Covid-19, a working hypothesis has been that a runaway immune response — possibly combined with a genetic predisposition — brought it on. Previous research had even looked for evidence of other coronaviruses in Kawasaki patients, but overall the evidence was generally only weakly correlated.
The new patterns emerging in places with severe outbreaks of Covid-19, however, are significant. And even though the Italian study was small, the researchers noted that the rate of Kawasaki-like cases at their hospital in the outbreak center of Bergamo had jumped 30 times to their usual rate in the month they studied.
The timing is also interesting to researchers. “If you look at the curves, Covid-19 has plateaued, but there’s an exponential rise in this secondary type of shock syndrome,” Jane Newburger, a cardiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital, said in a release. “It is even possible that the antibodies that children are making to SARS-CoV-2 are creating an immune reaction in the body. Nobody knows.”
According to Henderson, “It will be very important for other studies to replicate these results at other centers. It is even more important for doctors to enroll children in prospective studies to get the best information possible about this disease.”
Researchers are also interested in how this could clarify some outstanding questions about the virus itself — and how we might fight it in the broader population.
For example, “if this is an antibody-mediated phenomenon, there might be implications for vaccine studies, and this might also explain why some children become very ill with Covid-19, while the majority are unaffected or asymptomatic,” write Russell Viner, president of the Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health, and Elizabeth Whittaker, secretary of the British Pediatric Allergy Immunity and Infection Group, in a related commentary in The Lancet.
So far, at least three children have been reported to have died from this inflammatory illness in New York state. All 10 children in the Italian study have since recovered enough to be released from the hospital, although they were still taking medicine at the time of publication. And the researchers say they are scheduled to all have ECGs to check their heart function in the next couple of months.
Still, the researchers argue that the findings reveal a key potential consequence of Covid-19 infections in children.
“The association between SARS-CoV-2 and Kawasaki-like disease should be taken into account when it comes to considering social reintegration policies for the pediatric population,” the Lancet authors write.
In a Senate committee hearing Tuesday, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, also remarked that there are many unknowns with Covid-19, “particularly when it comes to children ... We really have to be very careful because the more and more we learn, we’re seeing what this virus can do.”
As Henderson told Vox, “As in any infection, it is important for parents to seek care with their pediatrician if their child has high fevers, new rash, significant abdominal pain, persistent vomiting, persistent diarrhea, or any other concerning symptom.”
But she and other doctors underscore that despite the increased incidence of the pediatric syndrome, it is still quite rare, “probably affecting no more than one in 1,000 children exposed to SARS-CoV-2,” the Lancet authors write. Henderson added, “most children with Covid-19 do very well and have mild symptoms.”


vox--2020-05-13--California’s special election to fill Katie Hill’s House seat, explained

Update , May 13 : Republican Mike Garcia has won the special election for California ’ s 25th District .
A special election to fill the US House of Representatives seat left vacant by former California Democratic Rep. Katie Hill ’ s resignation is being held Tuesday , May 12 .
The race , considered a toss-up by Cook Political Report , is being closely watched in part because of the circumstances that led to Hill ’ s leaving Congress and in part because the race is widely seen as previewing how the coronavirus pandemic will affect November ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for the Republican Party to retake one of the seats Democrats successfully flipped in the 2018 midterms .
Whoever wins the race — either Democrat Christy Smith or Republican Mike Garcia — will serve out the remaining eight months of Hill ’ s term .
Smith and Garcia will face off again in November in this year ’ s general election race .
Polls close at 11 pm ET .
Vox has live results in partnership with Decision Desk .
However , because the race will largely be conducted via mail-in voting , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ winner to emerge .
Hill became California District 25 ’ s US representative in 2018 after defeating ardent Trump ally former Rep. Steve Knight by less than 3 percent in 2018 .
She resigned from Congress last October after nude photographs of her were released by conservative blog RedState and after she admitted to having a consensual relationship with a staff member .
Although polling of Tuesday ’ s race has far been fairly sparse , what surveys are available show a race that is extremely close .
A poll of 500 of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by 1892 Polling in mid-March showed Garcia , a former fighter pilot , with 43 percent support to the 39 percent support for Smith — currently a California state representative — with 10 percent of likely voters undecided .
Given that the poll ’ s margin of error is 4.38 percent , Smith could have actually been in the lead .
That poll was taken before California Gov .
Gavin Newsom issued a shelter-at-home order on March 19 , forcing both campaigns to abandon traditional retail politicking techniques like door-knocking , in-person meet-and-greets @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that has had on polling is not clear , and it also is not clear what effect reduced in-person voting will have .
While Newsom issued an executive order Friday ordering mail-in ballots for November ’ s general election to be sent to all registered voters in the state , Tuesday ’ s special election will be conducted via a mix of mail-in and in-person voting .
Mail-in ballots haven ’ t been returned at an overwhelming rate , according to a National Republican Congressional Committee memo , which said that as of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ) had returned their ballots compared to 39,230 Democrats ( 35 percent ) and 16,528 ( 15 percent ) from unaffiliated voters .
The special election race is a likely bellwether for this fall ’ s general election Given that the race will essentially be re-run again in November , whoever wins will likely have a small incumbent advantage when they face off again in a few months .
Because it ’ s expected to be close , the race is seen as a national bellwether for this fall .
With her victory @ @ @ @ @ @ @ been held by Republicans since 1993 , helping Democrats take control of the House of Representatives .
Democrats are expected to keep control of the chamber after November ’ s elections .
But a solid Smith win could indicate that another blue wave is imminent this fall , while Republicans hope that a Garcia win might signal that their party could recover several of the House seats it lost during 2018 ’ s midterm election .
Because of this , the race has drawn attention from national politicians .
President Donald Trump accused @ @ @ @ @ @ @ election ” in a tweet Saturday after the National Republican Congressional Committee sent a “ call to arms ” to House Republicans , asking them to “ raise hell ” about the race .
Meanwhile , Smith has been endorsed by former President Barack Obama and former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton .
And the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has spent about $ 1.5 million on the race , while the National Republican Congressional Committee spent about $ 1.7 in supporting Garcia .
Outside groups dumped about $ 4.3 million into the race , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Two years ago , Hill spent $ 8,342,521 compared to Knight ’ s $ 2,582,818 .
Beyond the partisan stakes of the race , the election is being watched closely for pandemic-related campaign tactics that could be scaled to more national races .
The candidates debated over videoconference calling and both shifted toward phone-banking in lieu of door knocking .
“ We transitioned from being able to canvass , and stand on street corners waving signs , and going out to events with Mike , like meet-and-greets and that sort of thing , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , a volunteer for the Garcia campaign , told NPR .
Smith ’ s campaign followed a similar playbook and made sure staffers and volunteers were equipped with pandemic-related resources for those they reached out to by phone .
“ We ’ ve made sure that all of our callers , as they ’ re reaching out , are equipped with information like how to connect to state resources , the domestic violence hotline , mental health services , or being able to connect people with their nearest food pantry , ” Smith @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Tuesday , the two candidates will continue campaigning into the fall to compete for control of the seat for the next two years .
Hill resigned last fall after acknowledging having a consensual relationship with a female staffer The race , with all of its Covid-19-related complications , is more complicated due to the shadow of Hill .
A Democratic rising star , 32-year-old Hill was expected to defend her seat this November after a narrow but significant victory over Knight .
Hill was part of a congressional class that included a record-breaking @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Ye Hee Lee noted at the Washington Post , she was one of the first openly bisexual people to serve in Congress , and was one of the “ Big Six ” first-term members of Congress to serve in major leadership roles .
About halfway through her freshman term , however , Hill resigned after conservative outlet RedState reported that she and her husband had been involved in a relationship with a female campaign staffer , beginning in 2017 and ending after Hill moved to Washington in 2019 .
The site posted photos @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with the face of the staffer , who was not named , blurred out .
In one of the images , a woman identified by RedState as Hill is nude .
RedState went on to publish texts purportedly between the staffer and Hill ’ s husband , Heslep , alluding to abusive behavior in the relationship and to report that Hill had been involved in a year-long affair with her congressional legislative director , Graham Kelly , which caused her husband to file for divorce .
Hill said in a statement to the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I have been involved in a relationship with Mr. Kelly are absolutely false , ” and that she was “ saddened that the deeply personal matter of my divorce has been brought into public view and the vindictive claims of my ex have now involved the lives and reputations of unrelated parties.
” Then , in a separate statement to constituents , Hill acknowledged a relationship with the female campaign staffer , saying she knew it was “ inappropriate , but I still allowed it to happen despite my better judgment.
” The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ featured a request that the public respect her privacy , but also decried the manner in which the relationship came to light .
“ Distributing intimate photos with the intent to publish them is a crime , and the perpetrator should be punished to the full extent of the law , ” she said , adding that she had notified Capitol police about the leak of the photos .
Under Washington ’ s “ revenge porn ” law , enacted in 2014 , it ’ s illegal to try to harm someone by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ consent , and perpetrators can face up to three years in prison .
Such laws , now on the books in more than 30 states , are a response to a very real problem : According to one 2016 study , one in 25 Americans has been a victim of “ revenge porn.
” ( Heslep did not respond to the Post ’ s request for comment . )
In announcing her resignation , Hill added that after leaving office she would work to stop revenge porn .
“ My fight is going @ @ @ @ @ @ @ exploitation that so many women are victims to and which will keep countless women and girls from running for office , ” she said .
The circumstances around the former lawmaker ’ s exit led to an examination of the standards men and women in public office are held to , as Vox ’ s Li Zhou explained at the time : Rep. Duncan Hunter , a Republican lawmaker who prosecutors say engaged in five affairs , including one with his own staffer , is still in office .
The uproar that Hill @ @ @ @ @ @ @ highlight the double standard that men and women have long faced when it comes to the treatment of their sexuality : Not only were naked photos used to shame Hill — a tactic that ’ s leveraged overwhelmingly against women — the penalty she faced was far more severe than that experienced by many of her male counterparts .
This is not to say that Hill , herself , should not have resigned , but that others fielding similar allegations — like Hunter — should have to deal with the same consequences .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ as a point of comparison is President Donald Trump , who ’ s still in office after more than 20 allegations of sexual misconduct have been brought against him .
These double standards were not fully reckoned with , nor were concerns that the way Hill ’ s photographs were disseminated would discourage young women from running from office .
But they do mean Hill is not running for her old seat , and that either Smith or Garcia will soon represent the people of California ’ s 25th District .
Every day @ @ @ @ @ @ @ your most important questions and provide you , and our audience around the world , with information that has the power to save lives .
Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment : to empower you through understanding .
Vox ’ s work is reaching more people than ever , but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn .
Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation , but it will enable our staff to continue to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires .
Please consider making a contribution to Vox today .

Update, May 13: Republican Mike Garcia has won the special election for California’s 25th District.
A special election to fill the US House of Representatives seat left vacant by former California Democratic Rep. Katie Hill’s resignation is being held Tuesday, May 12.
The race, considered a toss-up by Cook Political Report, is being closely watched in part because of the circumstances that led to Hill’s leaving Congress and in part because the race is widely seen as previewing how the coronavirus pandemic will affect November’s elections. It also represents an opportunity for the Republican Party to retake one of the seats Democrats successfully flipped in the 2018 midterms.
Whoever wins the race — either Democrat Christy Smith or Republican Mike Garcia — will serve out the remaining eight months of Hill’s term. Smith and Garcia will face off again in November in this year’s general election race.
Polls close at 11 pm ET. Vox has live results in partnership with Decision Desk. However, because the race will largely be conducted via mail-in voting, it may take several days for a winner to emerge.
Hill became California District 25’s US representative in 2018 after defeating ardent Trump ally former Rep. Steve Knight by less than 3 percent in 2018. She resigned from Congress last October after nude photographs of her were released by conservative blog RedState and after she admitted to having a consensual relationship with a staff member.
Although polling of Tuesday’s race has far been fairly sparse, what surveys are available show a race that is extremely close.
A poll of 500 of the district’s likely voters conducted by 1892 Polling in mid-March showed Garcia, a former fighter pilot, with 43 percent support to the 39 percent support for Smith — currently a California state representative — with 10 percent of likely voters undecided. Given that the poll’s margin of error is 4.38 percent, Smith could have actually been in the lead.
That poll was taken before California Gov. Gavin Newsom issued a shelter-at-home order on March 19, forcing both campaigns to abandon traditional retail politicking techniques like door-knocking, in-person meet-and-greets, and fundraising events. What effect that has had on polling is not clear, and it also is not clear what effect reduced in-person voting will have.
While Newsom issued an executive order Friday ordering mail-in ballots for November’s general election to be sent to all registered voters in the state, Tuesday’s special election will be conducted via a mix of mail-in and in-person voting.
Mail-in ballots haven’t been returned at an overwhelming rate, according to a National Republican Congressional Committee memo, which said that as of Friday, 50,191 Republicans (45 percent) had returned their ballots compared to 39,230 Democrats (35 percent) and 16,528 (15 percent) from unaffiliated voters.
The special election race is a likely bellwether for this fall’s general election
Given that the race will essentially be re-run again in November, whoever wins will likely have a small incumbent advantage when they face off again in a few months.
Because it’s expected to be close, the race is seen as a national bellwether for this fall. With her victory, Hill flipped a seat that had been held by Republicans since 1993, helping Democrats take control of the House of Representatives.
Democrats are expected to keep control of the chamber after November’s elections. But a solid Smith win could indicate that another blue wave is imminent this fall, while Republicans hope that a Garcia win might signal that their party could recover several of the House seats it lost during 2018’s midterm election.
Because of this, the race has drawn attention from national politicians. President Donald Trump accused Democrats of trying to “steal the election” in a tweet Saturday after the National Republican Congressional Committee sent a “call to arms” to House Republicans, asking them to “raise hell” about the race.
Governor @GavinNewsom of California won’t let restaurants, beaches and stores open, but he installs a voting booth system in a highly Democrat area (supposed to be mail in ballots only) because our great candidate, @MikeGarcia2020, is winning by a lot. CA25 Rigged Election! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 9, 2020
Meanwhile, Smith has been endorsed by former President Barack Obama and former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
And the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has spent about $1.5 million on the race, while the National Republican Congressional Committee spent about $1.7 in supporting Garcia. Outside groups dumped about $4.3 million into the race, according to a recent OpenSecrets.org report. Two years ago, Hill spent $8,342,521 compared to Knight’s $2,582,818.
Beyond the partisan stakes of the race, the election is being watched closely for pandemic-related campaign tactics that could be scaled to more national races. The candidates debated over videoconference calling and both shifted toward phone-banking in lieu of door knocking.
“We transitioned from being able to canvass, and stand on street corners waving signs, and going out to events with Mike, like meet-and-greets and that sort of thing, to all phones,” Marian Salazar, a volunteer for the Garcia campaign, told NPR.
Smith’s campaign followed a similar playbook and made sure staffers and volunteers were equipped with pandemic-related resources for those they reached out to by phone.
“We’ve made sure that all of our callers, as they’re reaching out, are equipped with information like how to connect to state resources, the domestic violence hotline, mental health services, or being able to connect people with their nearest food pantry,” Smith told NPR.
Regardless of who wins Tuesday, the two candidates will continue campaigning into the fall to compete for control of the seat for the next two years.
Hill resigned last fall after acknowledging having a consensual relationship with a female staffer
The race, with all of its Covid-19-related complications, is more complicated due to the shadow of Hill.
A Democratic rising star, 32-year-old Hill was expected to defend her seat this November after a narrow but significant victory over Knight. Hill was part of a congressional class that included a record-breaking number of women. As reporter Michelle Ye Hee Lee noted at the Washington Post, she was one of the first openly bisexual people to serve in Congress, and was one of the “Big Six” first-term members of Congress to serve in major leadership roles.
About halfway through her freshman term, however, Hill resigned after conservative outlet RedState reported that she and her husband had been involved in a relationship with a female campaign staffer, beginning in 2017 and ending after Hill moved to Washington in 2019.
The site posted photos it said depicted the women together, with the face of the staffer, who was not named, blurred out. In one of the images, a woman identified by RedState as Hill is nude.
RedState went on to publish texts purportedly between the staffer and Hill’s husband, Heslep, alluding to abusive behavior in the relationship and to report that Hill had been involved in a year-long affair with her congressional legislative director, Graham Kelly, which caused her husband to file for divorce.
Hill said in a statement to the Post last October that “allegations that I have been involved in a relationship with Mr. Kelly are absolutely false,” and that she was “saddened that the deeply personal matter of my divorce has been brought into public view and the vindictive claims of my ex have now involved the lives and reputations of unrelated parties.”
Then, in a separate statement to constituents, Hill acknowledged a relationship with the female campaign staffer, saying she knew it was “inappropriate, but I still allowed it to happen despite my better judgment.”
The statement was supportive of the staffer and featured a request that the public respect her privacy, but also decried the manner in which the relationship came to light. “Distributing intimate photos with the intent to publish them is a crime, and the perpetrator should be punished to the full extent of the law,” she said, adding that she had notified Capitol police about the leak of the photos.
Under Washington’s “revenge porn” law, enacted in 2014, it’s illegal to try to harm someone by disseminating nude photographs of that person without consent, and perpetrators can face up to three years in prison. Such laws, now on the books in more than 30 states, are a response to a very real problem: According to one 2016 study, one in 25 Americans has been a victim of “revenge porn.” (Heslep did not respond to the Post’s request for comment.)
In announcing her resignation, Hill added that after leaving office she would work to stop revenge porn. “My fight is going to be to defeat this type of exploitation that so many women are victims to and which will keep countless women and girls from running for office,” she said.
The circumstances around the former lawmaker’s exit led to an examination of the standards men and women in public office are held to, as Vox’s Li Zhou explained at the time:
Rep. Duncan Hunter, a Republican lawmaker who prosecutors say engaged in five affairs, including one with his own staffer, is still in office. ... The uproar that Hill has encountered over these allegations serves to highlight the double standard that men and women have long faced when it comes to the treatment of their sexuality: Not only were naked photos used to shame Hill — a tactic that’s leveraged overwhelmingly against women — the penalty she faced was far more severe than that experienced by many of her male counterparts. This is not to say that Hill, herself, should not have resigned, but that others fielding similar allegations — like Hunter — should have to deal with the same consequences. Another example that’s been raised as a point of comparison is President Donald Trump, who’s still in office after more than 20 allegations of sexual misconduct have been brought against him.
These double standards were not fully reckoned with, nor were concerns that the way Hill’s photographs were disseminated would discourage young women from running from office. But they do mean Hill is not running for her old seat, and that either Smith or Garcia will soon represent the people of California’s 25th District.