But management told workers to wear masks only around suspected coronavirus patients an approach that Ms. Harris, in her complaint, compared to closing the gate after the horse has bolted. The company told her that aides who wanted masks were provided with them starting April 9. Not until April 18, a week before the outbreak, were masks required.

Even so, managers sometimes refused to wear masks themselves, including on medicine rounds to residents’ rooms, complaining that they itched, the three workers said.

— On a Scottish Isle, Nursing Home Deaths Expose a Covid-19 Scandal, Benjamin Mueller in The New York Times

And then there are the birds — so many birds, who all seem so much louder. In fact, it’s likely that they’re actually quieter now than before the pandemic. They no longer have to sing louder to be heard over the racket of the city, a behavior, known as the Lombard effect, that has been observed in other animals, too.

— The Coronavirus Quieted City Noise, Quoctrung Bui and Emily Badger in The New York Times

On Sunday, the New York Times published an op-ed series on cities and inequality pegged to the coronavirus crisis. But a piece on how to redesign urban space post-COVID-19 never once mentions race, revealing a troubling blind spot in the way urban designers talk about this crisis: The idea that safe, generous and accessible common space is fundamental to public life is an essential American ideaas old as the Boston Commonbut if our current catastrophe can help recapture this birthright, it will have served a small purpose. Colonial Massachusetts? Whose birthright are we talking about here, exactly?

— Coronavirus and cities: What urban designers don’t get about COVID-19, Alissa Walker in Curbed

I didn’t even realize I’d lost my desire to shop until one day, about six weeks into isolation, I absentmindedly clicked on a Madewell email offering an additional sale on a sale. I don’t even have anywhere to wear the jumpsuits I already own, let alone one that would require heels. Every work trip, every speaking gig, every quick vacation had already been canceled, even as my calendar still had reminders of the life I had planned in advance, on a different timeline, for myself. But in a matter of weeks, those, too, would be gone. I feel very lucky to spend my days walking my dog on the same loop I always take. But that walk, for the foreseeable future, requires no new purchases.

— The COVID-19 Recession May Change The Way Americans Spend Forever, Anne Helen Peterson in BuzzFeed News

But as soon as a truckload of 8,600 bags were unloaded at the company’s fulfillment centers, they were flying out the doors to customers, leaving the company out of stock until the next truck came in. It was the same pattern at grocery stores. As far as most consumers could tell, there was no flour anywhere, at any time, even though about half a million bags a week were being sold. ‘A shipment of product would come in the morning and be gone in a few hours,’ says Underwood. ‘If your trip to the store or your visit to the website didn’t line up exactly with those short times, you’d never see any.’

Pressed to produce more, the company formed a crisis response team, which met via video chat three times a day, every day, for the first several weeks after the initial surge in demand. ‘The first thing we had to do was agree on what we could accomplish,’ says Colberg. ‘During a crisis there are a lot of problems to solve, and you won’t be able to solve them all. We decided the one we had to solve was how to get more all-purpose flour to consumers.’

— Inside King Arthur Flour, the Company Supplying America’s Sudden Baking Obsession, David H. Freedman in Marker

We’re working with London’s boroughs to identify places where temporary changes are needed to support social distancing or that would benefit from cycling and walking improvements.

To help our customers walk and cycle wherever possible, we’re concentrating on three key areas:

• Quickly building a strategic cycling network, using temporary materials and including new routes, to help reduce crowding on the Tube and trains and on busy bus routes
• Changing town centres so local journeys can be safely walked and cycled where possible, for example with wider pavements on high streets to give space for queues outside shops as people safely walk past while socially distancing
• Reducing traffic on residential streets, creating low-traffic corridors right across London so more people can walk and cycle as part of their daily routine

Some of the temporary changes we’re making could become permanent.

— Streetspace for London, Transport for London

‘Jared [Kushner] had been arguing that testing too many people, or ordering too many ventilators, would spook the markets and so we just shouldn’t do it,’ says a Trump confidant who speaks to the president frequently. ‘That advice worked far more powerfully on him than what the scientists were saying. He thinks they always exaggerate.’

— Inside Trump’s coronavirus meltdown, Edward Luce in The Financial Times

In one of the biggest car-free initiatives of any city in the world, the capital’s mayor announced on Friday that main streets between between London Bridge and Shoreditch, Euston and Waterloo, and Old Street and Holborn, will be limited to buses, pedestrians and cyclists.

— Large areas of London to be made car-free as lockdown eased, Matthew Taylor in The Guardian