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Coronavirus April 28 Update: Both Houses of Congress to Return on May 4, Answers to FAQs on the Second Round of PPP Funding, and New Interest in Cashless Payments
Both chambers of Congress to return May 4, despite pandemic recommendations
Both chambers of Congress will return to the Capitol for regular legislative session on May 4, which is 11 days before the current stay-at-home order in Washington, D.C., expires.
“Senators will return to Washington D.C. one week from today. We will modify routines in ways that are smart and safe, but we will honor our constitutional duty to the American people and conduct critical business in person,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said in a statement on Monday.
A few hours later, House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer announced on a Democratic Caucus conference call that the House will also be in session next week and said votes are possible, according to his press office.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi said last week as the House came in for a brief session to pass a so-called interim coronavirus relief measure that she hoped a bipartisan task force examining rule changes to allow some remote operations would have a proposal ready to vote on when the House returned again.
Some Democrats also want their leadership to move quickly on another relief measure, with more aid targeted to individuals and families and states and localities.
McConnell said in his statement that the Senate will work on legislation to protect companies and health care workers from “opportunistic lawsuits” as the economy reopens. The Kentucky Republican said that liability provisions in the coronavirus response packages already signed into law were a start but that they need to be expanded and strengthened.
“Our nation is facing the worst pandemic in over a century and potentially the worst economic shock since the Great Depression. Our response must not be slowed, weakened, or exploited to set up the biggest trial lawyer bonanza in history,” McConnell said.
The Senate left Washington in late March, extending its Easter and Passover recess early over concerns about the spread of the coronavirus. McConnell subsequently extended the break for another two weeks, saying earlier this month that the Senate would not return to Washington “sooner than Monday, May 4th.”
The House left Washington even earlier on March 13, but members have returned twice since — once on March 27 and again on April 23 to vote on coronavirus relief legislation.
With a return now set for next week, both chambers are expected to hold regular weekly legislative sessions through May 22 before leaving for a weeklong Memorial Day recess, according to the schedule. But many on Capitol Hill have acknowledged that the previously announced calendar for 2020 has been upended and more changes could be ahead.
Read more on RollCall.com.
COVID-19 concerns prompt new interest in cashless payments
The COVID-19 pandemic has fanned public concerns that the coronavirus could be transmitted by handling cash, according to a recent report by the Switzerland-based Bank of International Settlements, prompting merchants and members of Congress to contemplate more sanitary, hands-off digital payment systems.
Although the BIS report says the scientific evidence suggests the probability of coronavirus transmission through banknotes and coins is low compared with other frequently touched objects, consumer anxiety about physical forms of currency could speed up the trend towards cashless, touchless payments.
The pandemic has already led one of Congress’ most prominent proponents of innovative financial technology to introduce legislation that would reduce the physical contact a consumer must make with payment terminals and related objects when making an in-store purchase.
Rep. French Hill, R-Ark., a member of the House Financial Services Committee’s Task Force on Financial Technology, last month proposed legislation that would establish that any swipe, dip or tap transaction at a merchant point-of-sale terminal wouldn’t trigger a signature requirement.
Republicans on the Financial Services Committee said in a memo when the legislation was introduced March 12 that innovation in credit and debit transaction verification means that signatures for such transactions are no longer necessary, and "eliminating the practice can cut down on the spread of the virus."
“The purpose of my legislation is to lessen the amount of direct person-to-person contact that happens during point-of-sale transactions to help mitigate the spread of COVID-19,” Hill told CQ Roll Call last week. He said he hopes the bill “will not only help the short-term effects of the pandemic, but can also have longer-term impacts by bringing awareness and potential modernization to our current payment infrastructure.”
Hill’s legislation has the support of the Financial Services Committee’s top Republican, Rep. Patrick T. McHenry of North Carolina.
“We can’t take on a new threat with old tactics,” McHenry said in a written statement when the bill was introduced. “We need to take a 21st century approach to combating the impacts of a public health crisis in our modern world.”
The BIS report notes that because the novel coronavirus survives best on nonporous materials, such as plastic or stainless steel, “debit or credit card terminals or PIN pads could transmit the virus too.”
The Electronic Transactions Association, an advocate for public policies that foster financial technology, points out that experts believe the coronavirus can remain viable as many as five days on plastic and four days on paper, which raises issues about the use of credit cards, terminals, cash and receipts.
Public curiosity and concerns about the role of paper money have manifested in online activity. The number of internet searches referencing both “cash” and “virus” is at record highs, according to the BIS report.
The United States, along with Australia, France, Singapore, Switzerland, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Canada, Jamaica and Kenya have had the highest recent search interest.
Read more on RollCall.com.
AI researchers seeking COVID-19 answers face hurdles
A month after the White House launched an effort that brought together technologists and artificial intelligence experts to scour the world’s repository of medical literature for insights on COVID-19, researchers last week reported that journals and publications designed to be read by people are posing challenges for computers to sift through.
Most scientific papers published and distributed using the PDF format are “not amenable to text processing,” the group of 24 researchers wrote in a paper published last week. While “the file format is designed to share electronic documents faithfully for reading and printing” they pose challenges for “automated analysis of document content.”
The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy on March 16 announced a collaborative venture that included the National Library of Medicine, which is part of the National Institutes of Health, Microsoft, Allen Institute for AI, Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, the Chan Zuckerberg Institute (named for Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder, and his wife Priscilla Chan), and Kaggle, which is a unit of Google.
The goal was to assemble a dataset of tens of thousands of scientific papers and literature on the coronavirus that would be examined using machine language and text processing programs to find patterns. That would help researchers rapidly answer questions raised by the World Health Organization and U.S. agencies about the pandemic.
Scientists all over the world have been working and publishing their findings on various strains of coronavirus over the years, including other variants such as SARS, MERS, and the latest, COVID-19. The application of artificial intelligence tools to look for commonalities and differences among the thousands of such published articles could help the scientists spot things they may have missed.
Read the full story on RollCall.com.