On Facebook feeds and Google search pages across the nation, potential voters are being bombarded with an avalanche of ads as political campaigning for the 2020 elections picks up. That outreach is seen as crucial by strategists in both parties given how the president harnessed online platforms to vault his unlikely candidacy in 2016. All told, Donald Trump and the Democratic presidential candidates have spent more than $25 million on online ads since January.

You wouldn’t know that, though, if you’re a resident of Maryland or Washington state. That’s because Google and Facebook are now refusing to run political ads in both states — together, home to 5 percent of the nation’s population and 22 electoral votes — due to stringent campaign-transparency laws that the tech giants say they can’t properly adhere to. Maryland and Washington are at the extreme end of a growing divide in the way different states will experience the 2020 election.

When Jean-Jacques Muyembe returned in 1974 to his home in Zaire, the African country that would later become the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the Belgium-trained virologist was flummoxed — because he had no way to practice. There were no labs at the time, nor laboratory animals for experiments.

Unfortunately, he would find plenty of real-world examples soon enough, from a meningitis outbreak in a soldiers’ camp and a cholera outbreak at the Port of Matadi. The most gruesome one came in 1976 when a Catholic mission run by Belgian nuns reported a mysterious disease. Thinking the patients had typhoid fever, he collected blood samples. But when removing the needle from people’s arms, the puncture wounds bled profusely. “My fingers and hands were covered in blood,” he later told the World Health Organization (WHO). It was one of the first known encounters with Ebola, which would later be isolated and named thanks to his work. “If I had not washed my hands, I would have died,” Muyembe said.

Driving down the bustling streets of downtown Hebron in the occupied West Bank, air conditioning blasting, we pull over to pick up Rawda Alshreef. A tiny 53-year-old clad in a race-car-red thobe (a dress-like robe), matching high heels and a baby-pink hijab, her energy immediately fills the car as she begins cracking jokes.

It is not until we arrive at the sports hall, where she changes into her black and red Adidas tracksuit, that she finally looks like the current and longest-reigning female table tennis champion in the Palestinian territories. “In tournaments, they always ask where is Rawda Alshreef?” she says, laughing. “If I’m there, they know that I will win. If I’m sick or miss a competition, then they have a chance.”