Stranger Than Fiction

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TOP NEWS

• House passed $484 billion bill to aid small businesses and hospitals. Trump is expected to sign the bill at noon today. In an effort to keep lawmakers safe amid COVID-19 concerns and upending decades of tradition, lawmakers were divided into eight groups of roughly 60 people, based on the alphabetization of their last name, and asked to stay in their offices until their group was permitted to vote.

• Georgia, Utah and Tennessee, states seeking to re-open, are doing so without full approval of medical professionals and emergency response officials. In Georgia, Governor Kemp said he would allow tattoo parlors, hair salons and bowling alleys to reopen without guidance from health officials. In Utah, elective procedures were allowed to resume without notifying hospitals who may not have enough PPE on hand to manage the additional patients.

• Trump suggested injecting disinfectants, using ultraviolet light to treat COVID-19, horrifying health officials and prompting Lysol to respond. Trump made the off-the-cuff comments after hearing how disinfectants kill the virus on surfaces.

WHAT I’M READING + WATCHING + LISTENING TO

• Consumers are loading up on comfort foods.

• Cheap, painful toilet paper maker pivots to comfy toilet paper production

• 🎧 Caring for the homeless during COVID-19

THE COMMENT

“I see the disinfectant that knocks it out in a minute, one minute,” Trump said during Thursday’s coronavirus press briefing. “And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning? Because you see it gets inside the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it would be interesting to check that.”

THE STRANGEST

• Dog breaks Australian record with litter of 21 puppies

THE AV ROOM