THE BIG STORY

What happened at Costco

Costco’s 547 retail warehouses across the country have been extremely busy for the last six weeks as customers stock up for the lockdown. That’s taken its toll on Costco workers. BuzzFeed News spoke to more than 100 of them about conditions in their stores, and they shared their stories: of managers not telling them about colleagues testing positive for the virus, or being slow to shut down and clean their stores after cases were confirmed.

Costco doesn’t want to talk about it and isn’t making the details public, but our reporting found that workers at at least 54 of its US warehouses have tested positive so far. At least two have died, employees said.

And it’s not just the warehouses. Even after authorities in Seattle advised companies to let their employees work from home where possible, staff at the Costco headquarters there were told they needed to keep coming into the office. The policy remained in place for weeks, and only changed after a member of staff died of complications from the coronavirus. She was still coming into work, coughing heavily, days before her death.

A Costco worker disinfects shopping carts (Mike Stewart / AP)

STAYING ON TOP OF THIS

The plan to reopen

In a call with state governors yesterday, the White House shared its guidelines for reopening the country. They call for a phased reopening, beginning with some businesses, schools, and other gathering places in parts of the country that have adequate testing capacity and a decreasing number of coronavirus cases.

You can read the full guidelines here. "We are not opening all at once, but one careful step at a time," President Donald Trump said in a briefing yesterday. "Some states will be able to open up sooner than others. Some states are not in the kind of trouble that others are in."

State governors ultimately will be the ones who make these calls, along with local authorities in cities and counties. But the White House proposed they take a three-step approach, beginning with people still working from home where possible, then moving on to the reopening of schools, and eventually, all workplaces.

SNAPSHOTS

Trump ally and veteran political operative Roger Stone has been denied a retrial. He was convicted of lying to Congress and witness tampering last year and faces a 40-month prison sentence.

Ten nurses at a California hospital were placed on administrative leave for refusing to work without protective gear. Being told to work with coronavirus patients without N95 masks “made us feel like they are valuing the lives of the doctors more than the nurses,” one said.

There were protests against lockdowns this week in Michigan, Kentucky, and North Carolina. Here’s what they looked like.

Congressman Max Rose spent the last two weeks of downtime serving in the National Guard. His unit set up an emergency hospital on Staten Island in New York, he told BuzzFeed News.

Roger Stone (Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)

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THE LOCKDOWN FOR TRANS STUDENTS

When safe places shutter

The nationwide closure of college campuses and accommodation has hit all students hard, but it has hit on a much deeper level for many trans students, Molly Hensley-Clancy reports. For them, it meant the loss of places where they lived with safety and dignity, could get the healthcare they needed, and could live freely as who they are.

Trans students told Hensley-Clancy how it feels to have lost those spaces. They described “the experience of being trapped in a pandemic with families who do not accept them — a whiplash change from a college campus where they are openly trans, most for the first time in their lives, to a house where they are misgendered and called by deadnames.”

“Many experienced a similar isolation in high school, before they were openly trans — without the community they’ve found in college to lean on. But that hasn’t made the experience of going back home, and back into hiding, easy.”

Ben Kothe / BuzzFeed News; Getty Images

SELF IMPROVEMENT COMES IN MANY FORMS

Some bake sourdough. Others master a new weapon.

We’re all looking for ways to keep ourselves occupied at home. Screenwriter Larry Karaszewski set himself a noble goal: he’d learn the art of the nunchucks.

"During the quarantine, I’ve been trying to go on hikes and trying to find some way to kind of get the heart rate,” he told Stephanie Baer. “I thought, Hey, what about those old nunchucks? And so I dug them out of the closet."

via @Karaszewski

It was a tough journey that involved occasionally nunchucking himself in the balls, but he’s now throwing those bad boys around like Michelangelo. You don’t want to mess with Larry Karaszewski these days, unless taking a nunchuck to the face is your idea of a good time.

And the process of mastering the traditional Japanese weapons has helped keep him together during a stressful time. “It releases the anxiety," he said. "You feel like you’re making some progress on something — you’re not just being a slug."

You can be a slug this weekend. But you can also be a slug *with nunchucks*,
Tom