Laurel Wamsley
Laurel Wamsley is a reporter for NPR's News Desk. She reports breaking news for NPR's digital coverage, newscasts, and news magazines, as well as occasional features. She was also the lead reporter for NPR's coverage of the 2019 Women's World Cup in France.
Wamsley got her start at NPR as an intern for Weekend Edition Saturday in January 2007 and stayed on as a production assistant for NPR's flagship news programs, before joining the Washington Desk for the 2008 election.
She then left NPR, doing freelance writing and editing in Austin, Texas, and then working in various marketing roles for technology companies in Austin and Chicago.
In November 2015, Wamsley returned to NPR as an associate producer for the National Desk, where she covered stories including Hurricane Matthew in coastal Georgia. She became a Newsdesk reporter in March 2017, and has since covered subjects including climate change, possibilities for social networks beyond Facebook, the sex lives of Neanderthals, and joke theft.
In 2010, Wamsley was a Journalism and Women Symposium Fellow and participated in the German-American Fulbright Commission's Berlin Capital Program, and was a 2016 Voqal Foundation Fellow. She will spend two months reporting from Germany as a 2019 Arthur F. Burns Fellow, a program of the International Center for Journalists.
Wamsley earned a B.A. with highest honors from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she was a Morehead-Cain Scholar. Wamsley holds a master's degree from Ohio University, where she was a Public Media Fellow and worked at NPR Member station WOUB. A native of Athens, Ohio, she now lives and bikes in Washington, DC.
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Among the questions this week: Can you get COVID-19 more than once? What's the maximum surface area that can be treated with one disinfecting wipe?
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More than 8,100 members of the U.S. National Guard have been mobilized across the U.S. to help communities deal with the coronavirus.
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Each week we're answering pressing questions about the coronavirus pandemic. This week the topics range from outdoor exercise to ibuprofen.
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Online video games are proving popular as people look for a way to socialize during this time of social distancing. Some game developers are even changing games' rules to cater to the new reality.
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Should you take that trip? How long does the virus last on surfaces? And what does it mean to "flatten the curve?"
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What had seemed unimaginable just days earlier is suddenly the new reality: Sports in America are on hold.
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The federal government has been sharply criticized for its slow response to the viral disease COVID-19, particularly when it comes to testing.
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The NCAA's move was the latest in a string of dramatic cancellations across the U.S. sports landscape.
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From a nationwide "red zone" to travel restrictions to school closures, governments around the globe are taking steps to try to slow the spread of the outbreak.
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According to the United Nations, almost two dozen countries on three continents have closed schools because of the virus. China by far has the most students affected: more than 233 million.