Attention to the Unseen

Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren write: Sixty-four thousand dead. Thirty million people out of work. Small businesses collapsing. Communities of color hit exceptionally hard. Even the most ideological conservatives have been forced to acknowledge that government is an essential part of the COVID-19 solution. Government delivers best when its actions are fair, transparent and accountable. But President Donald Trump’s approach to this crisis doesn’t reflect these values. Without change, more lives will be lost and more families will go broke….

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The Washington Post reports: The epidemiological models under review in the White House Situation Room in late March were bracing. In a best-case scenario, they showed the novel coronavirus was likely to kill between 100,000 and 240,000 Americans. President Trump was apprehensive about so much carnage on his watch, yet also impatient to reopen the economy — and he wanted data to justify doing so. So the White House considered its own analysis. A small team led by Kevin Hassett…

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Politico reports: Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, said on Sunday she found it “devastatingly worrisome” that anti-quarantine protesters in Michigan had flocked in tight quarters to the state Capitol, defying social-distancing guidelines. Appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” the doctor said the protesters at the rally were especially concerning because, “if they go home and infect their grandmother or their grandfather who has a comorbid condition, and they have a serious or an unfortunate outcome, they will…

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The New York Times reports: Australia has called for an inquiry into the origin of the virus. Germany and Britain are hesitating anew about inviting in the Chinese tech giant Huawei. President Trump has blamed China for the contagion and is seeking to punish it. Some governments want to sue Beijing for damages and reparations. Across the globe a backlash is building against China for its initial mishandling of the crisis that helped loose the coronavirus on the world, creating…

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Anne Applebaum writes: Quotations from the president’s astonishing April 23 press conference have appeared on every continent, via countless television channels, radio stations, magazines, and websites, in hundreds of thousands of variations and dozens of languages—often accompanied by warnings, in case someone was fooled, not to drink disinfectant or bleach. In years past, many of these outlets presumably published articles critical of this or that aspect of U.S. foreign policy, blaming one U.S. president or another. But the kind of…

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Frances Z. Brown write: How should a decorated public health professional serving in the White House react when the president of the United States stands next to her and openly muses about the medical potential of injecting disinfectant? This is the moral dilemma facing Deborah Birx, Anthony Fauci, Robert Redfield and other physicians and scientists coordinating the government’s pandemic response. When President Trump offers sorcery over evidence-based medicine — as when he said, in February, that warm weather would make…

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