News Room

Year after year, Jeff Bezos and his Amazon juggernaut have claimed bigger and bigger chunks of a growing and sweeping collection of industries — electric vehicles, cloud computing, movie making, and gourmet foods. But now Amazon has improbably also become the most central economic player in the country apart from the Fed itself — the omnipresent channel for what seems like all surviving commerce as Covid-19 increasingly brings business to a standstill.

Patients with COVID-19 have inundated hospitals in Italy, forcing doctors to make agonizing decisions about who should receive lifesaving care. Patient surges could soon demand distressing triage decisions in U.S. intensive care units (ICUs), too. As of Thursday, there were more than 13,000 confirmed cases in the U.S., and the nationwide death toll had risen to 175.

News about COVID-19 changes rapidly, which can leave many feeling confused about what they should do to protect themselves and others.

Coronavirus is well on its way to overwhelming US hospitals, but the capacity of health care systems varies widely from state-to-state and even city by city, and new data reveals which areas will be hit hardest.  

One-by-one over the past several weeks, Washington has gone through the steps at its disposal, each one more stringent and disruptive than the last, to limit the spread of the novel coronavirus.