We've known about SARS-CoV-2 for only three months, but scientists can make some educated guesses about where it came from and why it's behaving in such an extreme way. From a report: The structure of the virus provides some clues about its success. In shape, it's essentially a spiky ball. Those spikes recognize and stick to a protein called ACE2, which is found on the surface of our cells: This is the first step to an infection. The exact contours of SARS-CoV-2's spikes allow it to stick far more strongly to ACE2 than SARS-classic did, and "it's likely that this is really crucial for person-to-person transmission," says Angela Rasmussen of Columbia University. In general terms, the tighter the bond, the less virus required to start an infection. There's another important feature. Coronavirus spikes consist of two connected halves, and the spike activates when those halves are separated; only then can the virus enter a host cell. In SARS-classic, this separation happens with some difficulty. But in SARS-CoV-2, the bridge that connects the two halves can be easily cut by an enzyme called furin, which is made by human cells and -- crucially -- is found across many tissues. "This is probably important for some of the really unusual things we see in this virus," says Kristian Andersen of Scripps Research Translational Institute. Further reading: How the Coronavirus Could Take Over Your Body (Before You Ever Feel It)

NASA unsticks its Martian digging probe by whacking it with a shovel. From a report: Every day, the InSight lander's suite of instruments sends back data proving that the Red Planet isn't really dead. Marsquakes rumble the seismometer. Swirling vortices register on onboard pressure sensor. And temperature sensors help track the weather and changing of the seasons. Despite the lander's successes, however, one gauge has met with resistance from the Martian environment while trying to carry out its mission. Something has stopped InSight's 15-inch digging probe, dubbed "the mole" for its burrowing prowess. Instead of diving deep into the Martian sand where it could take the planet's temperature, it's been stuck half-buried. An intercontinental team of MacGyvers has spent a year devising successively daring plans to get the mole digging again, but still it flounders on the surface. Now their final gambit -- directly pushing the mole into the soil -- has shown tentative signs of success, NASA announced Friday on Twitter.

The goal of the mole, which is the measurement probe of InSight's Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package (or HP3), is to track the temperature variations of Mars itself. This heat comes from Mars's core, which, like Earth's core, remains warm from the planet's birth. By measuring it, researchers hope to learn about Mars's formation -- but from the rod-shaped mole's current position they can get readings only of the surface temperature. Mission planners hope to ideally reach 15 feet underground to escape the warming and cooling from the Martian seasons that would interfere with reading the planet's true temperature. A rock could be in the way, but the more likely culprit appears to be the Martian soil. Previous observations had led the German Aerospace Center engineers who designed the probe to expect that it would be digging through loose sand. They built the mole to bounce up and down like a jackhammer, sinking with each stroke and threading its way around any modestly sized rocks it encountered. But the probe has found soil that seems more dirt-like than sand-like; It sticks together and doesn't collapse around the mole to give it enough friction to dig. What the mole needs is a little nudge.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has collaborated with Microsoft to introduce the Coronavirus Self-Checker, a tool designed to better help you understand the disease which has caused over 10,000 confirmed cases in the United States and claimed at least 187 lives. From a report: The chatbot is another step Microsoft has taken to educate the public about the viral outbreak, after developing home-testing kits, a COVID-19 tracker tool, and a $100 million donation for global coronavirus research. At the very beginning of the chat, the bot asks if you are sick or if you have been in touch with someone who is sick. The conversation cuts short if you select no, noting that this "Coronavirus Self-Checker system is for those who may be sick." Although a considerable amount of data indicates that many COVID-19 carriers are asymptomatic or presymptomatic, the bot is specifically for individuals displaying visible symptoms of the virus.

A global arms race for a coronavirus vaccine is underway. The New York Times reports: In the three months since the virus began its deadly spread, China, Europe and the United States have all set off at a sprint to become the first to produce a vaccine. But while there is cooperation on many levels -- including among companies that are ordinarily fierce competitors -- hanging over the effort is the shadow of a nationalistic approach that could give the winner the chance to favor its own population and potentially gain the upper hand in dealing with the economic and geostrategic fallout from the crisis. What began as a question of who would get the scientific accolades, the patents and ultimately the revenues from a successful vaccine is suddenly a broader issue of urgent national security. And behind the scramble is a harsh reality: Any new vaccine that proves potent against the coronavirus -- clinical trials are underway in the United States, China and Europe already -- is sure to be in short supply as governments try to ensure that their own people are the first in line.

In China, 1,000 scientists are at work on a vaccine, and the issue has already been militarized: Researchers affiliated with the Academy of Military Medical Sciences have developed what is considered the nation's front-runner candidate for success and is recruiting volunteers for clinical trials. China "will not be slower than other countries," Wang Junzhi, a biological products quality control expert with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said Tuesday at a news conference in Beijing. The effort has taken on propaganda qualities. Already, a widely circulated photograph of Chen Wei, a virologist in the People's Liberation Army, receiving an injection of what was advertised to be the first vaccine, has been exposed as a fake, taken before a trip she made to Wuhan, where the virus began. President Trump has talked in meetings with pharmaceutical executives about making sure a vaccine is produced on American soil, to assure the United States controls its supplies. German government officials said they believed he tried to lure a German company, CureVac, to do its research and production, if it comes to that, in the United States.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Economist: When the 2020 United States census, scheduled for April 1st, was planned, the areas of most concern were mapped. They include places like Deep East Texas, an area of 10,000 square miles north-east of Houston with a population of roughly 385,000 people. In large parts of the region most people do not have internet access. Many live in places only accessible with four-wheel drives. Counting everybody in Deep East Texas was never going to be easy. Now it looks like it may be near impossible. "The coronavirus has certainly complicated matters," says Lonnie Hunt, the director of the Deep East Texas Council of Governments (detcog), an intergovernmental agency. To help ensure an accurate count, detcog had hired a dozen census coordinators to go out to community events -- sports matches, church services, school sports days -- with information to persuade people to send their returns in, and internet hotspots and iPads with which to do it on the spot. Most of those events are now being cancelled. With people staying indoors, they probably will not encounter any of the workers meant to explain to them the importance of the census and get them to fill it in. The virus may represent the biggest threat to the United States census in its 230-year history.

So far the Census Bureau has only made modest changes. On March 18th the agency announced that all field operations are to be suspended until April 1st. On other surveys officials will make phone calls instead of visits. It has asked administrators of "group quarters" -- institutions like nursing homes, prisons and college dormitories -- to "choose a way to count their residents that requires less in-person contact." But more radical adjustments may be needed. Terri Ann Lowenthal, a former director of the House committee that oversees the census, notes that the count takes ten years to plan, and "yet now the Census Bureau is being forced to make shifts basically on the fly." On March 17th Brazil announced it would delay its census by a year. American officials might have to consider that, too.

A reader shares a report from Space.com: A cannonball that Japan's Hayabusa2 probe fired at Ryugu, a 2,790-foot-wide near-Earth asteroid] is shedding light on the most common type of asteroid in the solar system, a new study reports. [...] The cannonball, dubbed the Small Carry-on Impactor (SCI), blasted out a crater about 47.5 feet (14.5 m) wide with an elevated rim and a central conical pit about 10 feet (3 m) wide and 2 feet (0.6 m) deep. The artificial crater was semicircular in shape, and the curtain of ejected material was asymmetrical. Both of these details suggest that there was a large boulder buried near the impact site, the researchers said.

This conclusion matches the rubble-pile picture that scientists already had of Ryugu. Features of the artificial crater and the plume suggested that the growth of a crater was limited mostly by the asteroid's gravity and not by the strength of the space rock's surface. This, in turn, suggested that Ryugu has a relatively weak surface, one only about as strong as loose sand, which is consistent with recent findings that Ryugu is made of porous, fragile material. These new findings suggest that Ryugu's surface is about 8.9 million years old, while other models suggested that the asteroid's surface might be up to about 158 million years old. All in all, while Ryugu is made of materials up to 4.6 billion years old, the asteroid might have coalesced from the remains of other broken-apart asteroids only about 10 million years ago, Arakawa said. The findings have been published in the journal Science.

NASA needs 215 more petabytes of storage by the year 2025, and expects Amazon Web Services to provide the bulk of that capacity. However, the space agency didn't realize this would cost it plenty in cloud egress charges. As in, it will have to pay as scientists download its data. The Register reports: The data in question will come from NASA's Earth Science Data and Information System (ESDIS) program, which collects information from the many missions that observe our planet. NASA makes those readings available through the Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS). To store all the data and run EOSDIS, NASA operates a dozen Distributed Active Archive Centers (DAACs) that provide pleasing redundancy. But NASA is tired of managing all that infrastructure, so in 2019, it picked AWS to host it all, and started migrating its records to the Amazon cloud as part of a project dubbed Earthdata Cloud. The first cut-over from on-premises storage to the cloud was planned for Q1 2020, with more to follow. The agency expects to transfer data off-premises for years to come.

NASA also knows that a torrent of petabytes is on the way. Some 15 imminent missions, such as the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) and the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellites, are predicted to deliver more than 100 terabytes a day of data. We mention SWOT and NISAR because they'll be the first missions to dump data directly into Earthdata Cloud. The agency therefore projects that by 2025 it will have 247 petabytes to handle, rather more than the 32 it currently wrangles. NASA thinks this is all a great idea. And it will -- if NASA can afford to operate it. And that's a live question because a March audit report [PDF] from NASA's Inspector General noticed EOSDIS hadn't properly modeled what data egress charges would do to its cloudy plan. NASA "has not yet determined which data sets will transition to Earthdata Cloud nor has it developed cost models based on operational experience and metrics for usage and egress," the Inspector General's Office wrote. "As a result, current cost projections may be lower than what will actually be necessary to cover future expenses and cloud adoption may become more expensive and difficult to manage."

"Collectively, this presents potential risks that scientific data may become less available to end users if NASA imposes limitations on the amount of data egress for cost control reasons."

All residents in the state of California are being ordered to "stay at home" to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. "We need to bend the curve in the state of California," Governor Gavin Newsom said in a press conference. "There's a social contract here, people I think recognize the need to do more. They will adjust and adapt as they have." Newsom added: "Home isolation is not my preferred choice... but it is a necessary one. This is not a permanent state, it is a moment in time."

As of publication, 19 people in California have died and another 958 have tested positive for the disease. "The state projects that 25.5 million people in California will be infected with the coronavirus over an eight-week period," reports Los Angeles Times, citing a letter Newsom sent to President Trump on Wednesday. Newsom is requesting $1 billion in federal funds to support the state's medical response to the virus. He's also requesting the deployment of the U.S. Navy's Mercy Hospital Ship to the Port of Los Angeles through Sept. 1.

"The economic disruption caused by this public health crisis will have immediate and devastating effects on our entire country, including too many families in California," Newsom wrote. "The magnitude of this crisis is extraordinary and federal-state-local government coordination will be more critical than ever before."

As millions of Americans hunker down to slow the spread of COVID-19, U.S. broadband networks are seeing a significant spike in usage. While industry insiders say that the U.S. internet should be able to handle the strain overall, broadband availability, affordability, and slow speeds could still pose a serious problem for many housebound U.S. residents. From a report: In a blog post, Cloudflare noted that Seattle, ground zero for the U.S. coronavirus spread, has seen internet usage spike by some 40 percent. Key internet exchanges in cities like Amsterdam, London, and Frankfurt have seen a 10 to 20 percent spike in traffic since around March 9. ISPs use a number of modern network technologies to handle congestion in real time, often letting them intelligently and automatically "deprioritize" the traffic of heavy users in overloaded areas. Even then, the massive surge in usage will likely impact U.S. broadband speeds in the weeks and months to come, industry trackers say. Broadband Now, a company that tracks U.S. broadband availability and speed, told Motherboard that six of the biggest U.S. cities by population have seen little to no change in median speed test results from the past 11 weeks.

Razer CEO Ming-Liang Tan announced on Thursday that the company will shift a number of its manufacturing lines from producing its own products to making surgical masks. Polygon reports: As COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, continues to spread around the world, healthcare officials are reporting shortages of essential resources, including surgical masks. Tan said Razer intends donate up to 1 million masks to healthcare providers globally; its first shipments will go to healthcare authorities in Singapore, where Razer's Southeast Asia headquarters is located.

The Razer CEO said designers and engineers have been working "24-hour shifts" to convert the company's production lines. "While there has been incredible demand for our products during this time with many staying home to avoid the crowds (and to play games), the team at Razer understands that all of us have a part to play in fighting the virus -- no matter which industry we come from," Tan said. He added that "emergency conversion" of Razer's manufacturing lines is the first step in the company's plan. "We are committed to contributing our extra time, resources, effort and talent toward the fight against COVID-19," Tan said. Elon Musk said on Twitter that Tesla "would make ventilators if there is a shortage." This prompted New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio to tweet out the plea: "Our country is facing a drastic shortage and we need ventilators ASAP -- we will need thousands in this city over the next few weeks. We're getting them as fast as we can but we could use your help!"

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: In a great example of what can happen when smart, technically-oriented people come together in a time of need, an open-source hardware project started by a group including Irish entrepreneur Colin Keogh and Breeze Automation CEO and co-founder Gui Calavanti has produced a prototype ventilator using 3D-printed parts and readily available, inexpensive material. The ventilator prototype was designed and produced in just seven days, after the project spun up on Facebook and attracted participation from over 300 engineers, medical professionals and researchers.

The prototype will now enter into a validation process by the Irish Health Services Executive (HSE), the country's health regulatory body. This will technically only validate it for use in Ireland, which ironically looks relatively well-stocked for ventilator hardware, but it will be a key stamp of approval that could pave the way for its deployment across countries where there are shortages, including low-income nations. The group behind the ventilator also recently changed the focus of their Facebook community, renaming the group from the Open Source Ventilator Project to the Open Source COVID19 Medical Supplies community. They're looking at expanding their focus to finding ways to cheaply and effectively build and validate other needed equipment, including protective gear like masks, sanitizer and protective face guards for front-line healthcare workers.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: On Wednesday, Twitter updated its safety policy to prohibit tweets that "could place people at a higher risk of transmitting COVID-19." The new policy bans tweets denying expert guidance on the virus, encouraging "fake or ineffective treatments, preventions and diagnostic techniques" as well as tweets that mislead users by pretending to be from health authorities or experts. In its blog post, Twitter says that it will "require people to remove Tweets" in these cases and we've asked the company for more clarification on what that looks like.

Twitter indicated that it will take context like account history into account in making its enforcement determinations, which it says remain unchanged. As far as having users remove offending tweets, according to the company's existing guidance "When we determine that a Tweet violated the Twitter Rules, we require the violator to remove it before they can Tweet again." A user is notified of this via email and given a chance to delete the tweet or make an appeal. While that is happening, the tweet is hidden from view. Under the ruleset, a tweet that claims "social distancing is not effective" would be subject to removal. Twitter will also require users to delete tweets telling followers to do ineffective or dangerous things like drinking bleach, even if the tweet is "made in jest" because that content can prove harmful when taken out of context. Twitter is banning tweets encouraging people to behave in a way counter to what health authorities recommend. The rules will also prohibit users from playing armchair doctor, as well as making coronavirus claims that single out groups of people based on race or nationality.

U.S. Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Stephen Hahn addressed the ongoing work of the agency in terms of its work on potential treatments and vaccines for the COVID-19 coronavirus currently spreading globally. From a report: Despite a claim early in Thursday's White House briefing on the pandemic by President Donald Trump that one proposed treatment, anti-malarial chloroquine, had already been approved by the FDA for COVID-19 treatment, Hahn said that in fact the agency is currently looking at widespread clinical trials of the drug, but it is not yet approved for that use. "In the short term, we're looking at drugs that are already approved for other indications," Dr. Hahn said.

"Many Americans have read studies and heard media reports about this drug chloroquine, which is an anti-malarial drug. It's already approved, as the president said, for the treatment of malaria [Trump had not said this, but had instead said it was now approved for COVID-19] as well as an arthritis condition. That's a drug that the president has directed us to take a closer look at, as to whether an expanded use approach to that could be done to actually see if that benefits patients. And again, we want to do that in the setting of a clinical trial, a large pragmatic clinical trial to actually gather that information and answer the question that needs to be answered." Another potential treatment which has shown signs of possible positive effect, remdesivir, was also cited by Trump as being very "near" approval for use by the FDA. Hahn clarified that in fact, while remdesivir is currently undergoing clinical trials, it's following the normal FDA process for approval for clinical medical therapeutic use in the U.S.

More than 99% of Italy's coronavirus fatalities were people who suffered from previous medical conditions, according to a study [PDF] by the country's national health authority. Reader schwit1 shares a report: The new study could provide insight into why Italy's death rate, at about 8% of total infected people, is higher than in other countries. The Rome-based institute has examined medical records of about 18% of the country's coronavirus fatalities, finding that just three victims, or 0.8% of the total, had no previous pathology. Almost half of the victims suffered from at least three prior illnesses and about a fourth had either one or two previous conditions. More than 75% had high blood pressure, about 35% had diabetes and a third suffered from heart disease.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Employees for Best Buy-owned Geek Squad who visit people's homes to install electronics are fearful that they may get sick or help spread the coronavirus as they are told to keep working during the pandemic. Many Geek Squad employees told Motherboard that their customers are most at risk of having a severe case of Covid-19, because many of them are elderly or have underlying health conditions. The news comes after Motherboard reported how Best Buy was running at "full capacity," allowing hundreds of customers in stores at once and leading multiple employees to believe Best Buy saw a business opportunity in staying open during a time of crisis. After publication, Best Buy announced it would shorten opening hours and limit the number of customers allowed inside stores.

In-house agents are tasked with setting up and repairing Best Buy customers' electronics in their homes. That might include installing a doorbell, television set, kitchen appliance, or setting up their computer or home router, for example. "They're expected to be in people's homes where there are no personal boundaries, no social distancing, touching of product, etc," one current Geek Squad employee told Motherboard. "They have compared their employees to 'essential workers' [...] such as gas stations, hospitals, grocery stores." An internal Best Buy email sent to agents and obtained by Motherboard reflected this, saying "The work we do is considered essential to our client's and customer's [sic] needs and we are being asked to continue to serve our clients in their homes." Elderly people who cannot install technology themselves may wish to have such a service during the looming quarantine period in the U.S. But multiple Geek Squad employees Motherboard spoke to highlighted how they may be putting clients at risk because in-house agents cater heavily to retirement communities and senior citizens in general. Best Buy says if a customer is showing symptoms while an agent is in their home, the agent is allowed to cancel the current appointment. Agents can also ask in a pre-visit call if anyone in the household is experiencing symptoms. But as for the first point, "you'd already be at the potential risk of exposure!" one agent said.

Another internal message said that customers no longer need to sign for completion of a visit, so as to minimize contact between clients and Best Buy employees' phones.

schwit1 shares a report from IEEE Spectrum: Here on Earth, our lives have been transformed by the Global Positioning System, fleets of satellites operated by the United States and other countries that are used in myriad ways to help people navigate. Down here, GPS is capable of pinpointing locations with accuracy measured in centimeters. Could it help astronauts on lunar voyages? Kar-Ming Cheung and Charles Lee of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California did the math, and concluded that the answer is yes: Signals from existing global navigation satellites near the Earth could be used to guide astronauts in lunar orbit, 385,000 km away. The researchers presented their newest findings at the IEEE Aerospace Conference in Montana this month.

Cheung and Lee plotted the orbits of navigation satellites from the United States's Global Positioning System and two of its counterparts, Europe's Galileo and Russia's GLONASS system -- 81 satellites in all. Most of them have directional antennas transmitting toward Earth's surface, but their signals also radiate into space. Those signals, say the researchers, are strong enough to be read by spacecraft with fairly compact receivers near the moon. Cheung, Lee and their team calculated that a spacecraft in lunar orbit would be able to "see" between five and 13 satellites' signals at any given time -- enough to accurately determine its position in space to within 200 to 300 meters. In computer simulations, they were able to implement various methods for improving the accuracy substantially from there.

On Monday, the Imperial College report on COVID-19 was released and the results are terrifying. For those who may not know, the Imperial College in London "has advised the government on its response to previous epidemics, including SARS, avian flu and swine flu," reports The New York Times. "With ties to the World Health Organization and a team of 50 scientists, led by a prominent epidemiologist, Neil Ferguson, Imperial is treated as a sort of gold standard, its mathematical models feeding directly into government policies."

In a series of tweets, Jeremy C. Young, Assistant Professor of History at Dixie State, summarized what the report says would happen if the U.S. does absolutely nothing. That is, if we treat COVID-19 like the flu, go about our business, and let the virus take its course. The Imperial College team plugged infection and death rates from China, Korea, and Italy into epidemic modeling software and ran a simulation... Here's what would happen: 80% of Americans would get the disease. 0.9% of them would die. Between 4 and 8 percent of all Americans over the age of 70 would die. 2.2 million Americans would die from the virus itself. It gets worse. People with severe COVID-19 need to be put on ventilators. 50% of those on ventilators still die, but the other 50% live. But in an unmitigated epidemic, the need for ventilators would be 30 times the number available in the US. Nearly 100% of these patients die.

So the actual death toll from the virus would be closer to 4 million Americans -- in a span of 3 months. 8-15% of all Americans over 70 would die. How many is 4 million people? It's more Americans than have died all at once from anything, ever. It's the population of Los Angeles. It's 4 times the number of Americans who died in the Civil War...on both sides combined. It's two-thirds as many people as died in the Holocaust. Americans make up 4.4% of the world's population. If we extrapolate these numbers to the rest of the world (warning: MOE is high here), this gives us 90 million deaths globally from COVID-19, in 3-6 months. 15 Holocausts. 1.5 times as many people as died in all of World War II. The Imperial College then ran the numbers for what would happen if countries assumed a "mitigation" strategy and "suppression" strategy. You can read the full summarized breakdown of what happens in each scenario below, but basically the mitigation strategy flattens the curve with an actual death toll at around two million deaths while the suppression strategy has the death rate in the U.S. peaking at 3 weeks with only a few thousand deaths.

You can view a screenshot of the thread below:

schwit1 shares a report from UPI: Construction on NASA's mobile launcher program for the new Space Launch System moon rocket is 44 percent over budget and three years behind schedule, a new report said. The space agency has built one massive rolling platform to move its moon rockets, with another on the way. Crews are adapting the first launcher to be mated with the SLS rocket for its first launch, planned later this year. But the first launcher cost $308 million more than a budget set in 2014, for a total of $693 million, according to the report released Tuesday from NASA's Office of Inspector General. Construction of the first platform "lacked coordination and competition with design contractors, coupled with ... design errors and integration challenges that drove the project's cost increases and schedule delays," the report said.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket overcame a rare in-flight engine failure soon after launch from Florida's Space Coast Wednesday to place 60 satellites in orbit for the company's Starlink Internet network. Spaceflight Now reports: One of the rocket's nine first stage engines shut down prematurely around 2 minutes, 22 seconds, after liftoff from pad 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, an event visible in a view from a camera streaming live video from the Falcon 9 as it climbed into the upper atmosphere. Elon Musk, SpaceX's founder and CEO, confirmed in a tweet that the Falcon 9 experienced an "early engine shutdown on ascent, but it didn't affect orbit insertion." The rocket's other Merlin engines fired a little longer to compensate for the loss of thrust. The rest of the Falcon 9's climb into orbit appeared to go according to plan, and the upper stage deployed the 60 Starlink satellites into orbit around 15 minutes after liftoff. "Shows value of having 9 engines!" Musk wrote on Twitter.

The first stage missed a landing attempt on SpaceX's drone ship parked in the Atlantic Ocean northeast of Cape Canaveral, the second time SpaceX has missed a rocket landing in the company's last three missions. It was not immediately clear whether the engine shutdown on ascent affected the recovery attempt. Musk promised a "thorough investigation" of Wednesday's early engine shutdown before the next Falcon 9 launch, and it was not immediately clear whether the inquiry might prompt launch delays.

According to The Associated Press and confirmed by The Wall Street Journal, General Motors, Ford, and Fiat Chrysler will shut down their factories for at least two weeks. "Meanwhile, Tesla appears to be defying officials in Alameda County, California -- the site of its only North American factory, in Freemont -- who have ordered Tesla to stop operations," reports Ars Technica. From the report: TechCrunch reports that a Wednesday email from the company's human resources department instructed employees to come to work. "We still do not have final word from the city, county, state and federal government on the status of our operations," the email said. "We have had conflicting guidance from different levels of government."

In an email published Tuesday by Eletrek, Tesla's head of HR argued that Tesla didn't need to shut down because the company counts as National Critical Infrastructure, as defined by the Department of Homeland Security. The category "includes auto manufacturing and energy infrastructure," according to Tesla. "People need access to transportation and energy, and we are essential to providing it," the email said. Tesla evidently believes that its interpretation of this DHS guidance supersedes the instructions of Alameda County officials to shut down. It remains to be seen if Alameda County officials agree. UPDATE: BuzzFeed News is reporting that Tesla will drop from around 10,000 employees to 2,500, following a shelter-in-place order announced on Monday in six counties in the San Francisco Bay Area. It's unclear when the scaleback will take place, or what the company is doing to prevent those workers from being infected with or spreading the virus.