Browsed by
Author: From elsewhere

The soldiers on the front lines saving America right now are mostly women and more likely not white

The soldiers on the front lines saving America right now are mostly women and more likely not white

The New York Times reports: Every day, Constance Warren stands behind the cold cuts counter at a grocery store in New Orleans, watching the regular customers come and go. They thank Ms. Warren and tell her they do not like being stuck indoors, waiting out the epidemic. She wraps their honey-smoked turkey and smiles. It is good to have a job right now, the mixed fortune of being deemed an essential worker. But she wonders whether, once everyday life is…

Read More Read More

Gretchen Whitmer isn’t backing down

Gretchen Whitmer isn’t backing down

The New York Times reports: She is a first-term governor and rising star in the Democratic Party, a frequent critic of the Trump administration for its handling of the coronavirus health crisis and a prominent foil of the president’s in the heated debate over when to reopen the nation for business. Now the governor, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, has also become a prime target in the growing partisan storm over stay-at-home orders during the outbreak, which was highlighted on Wednesday…

Read More Read More

Trump is inciting the violent overthrow of government

Trump is inciting the violent overthrow of government

Mary McCord writes: President Trump incited insurrection Friday against the duly elected governors of the states of Michigan, Minnesota and Virginia. Just a day after issuing guidance for re-opening America that clearly deferred decision-making to state officials — as it must under our Constitutional order — the president undercut his own guidance by calling for criminal acts against the governors for not opening fast enough. Trump tweeted, “LIBERATE MINNESOTA!” followed immediately by “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” and then “LIBERATE VIRGINIA, and save…

Read More Read More

Coronavirus testing needs to triple before the U.S. can reopen, experts say

Coronavirus testing needs to triple before the U.S. can reopen, experts say

The New York Times reports: As some governors consider easing social distancing restrictions, new estimates by researchers at Harvard University suggest that the United States cannot safely reopen unless it conducts more than three times the number of coronavirus tests it is currently administering over the next month. An average of 146,000 people per day have been tested for the coronavirus nationally so far this month, according to the COVID Tracking Project, which on Friday reported 3.6 million total tests…

Read More Read More

Want to know how many people have the coronavirus? Test randomly

Want to know how many people have the coronavirus? Test randomly

Polls and surveys use random sampling. Why not pandemic testing? Gerville/E+ via Getty Images By Daniel N. Rockmore, Dartmouth College and Michael Herron, Dartmouth College Consider these two questions: What percentage of Americans are, or have been, infected with the coronavirus? And, what is the probability of dying from the virus if you catch it? One of the most unsettling aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic is that these two fundamental rates – the coronavirus infection rate and the case fatality…

Read More Read More

What history can teach us about building a fairer society after the coronavirus pandemic

What history can teach us about building a fairer society after the coronavirus pandemic

Richard Power Sayeed writes: In the middle of the 14th century, the Black Death killed perhaps a third of Europe’s population, hastening the breakdown of rigid social hierarchies – what we now call “feudalism” – to an astonishing degree. But there was nothing inevitable about that transformation. It happened because people such as William Caburn exploited the crisis. Two years after the plague hit England, this Lincolnshire ploughman was in court for “refusing to work at the daily rate”. He…

Read More Read More

What do you owe your neighbor? The pandemic might change your answer

What do you owe your neighbor? The pandemic might change your answer

Alexander W. Cappelen, Ranveig Falch, Erik O. Sorensen, Bertil Tungodden and Gus Wezerek write: America will almost certainly emerge from the coronavirus pandemic as a different society. A new survey suggests the experience has already changed what we believe we owe our neighbors and how much economic inequality we find acceptable. Seeking to understand how the crisis might affect Americans’ moral perspectives, Times Opinion partnered with Alexander W. Cappelen, Ranveig Falch, Erik O. Sorensen and Bertil Tungodden at FAIR —…

Read More Read More

We are probably only one-tenth of the way through the coronavirus pandemic

We are probably only one-tenth of the way through the coronavirus pandemic

David Wallace-Wells writes: We are, finally, beginning to see some real plans from people with the power to enact them. On Tuesday, California governor Gavin Newsom unveiled a sort of road map for a gradual “reopening” of the state — including benchmarks for testing and hospital capacity, and continued social-distancing guidelines and even temperature checks. A handful of serious, sobering national proposals have been put forward by think tanks and the like in the U.S., and the White House has…

Read More Read More

Early data on antiviral drug suggests Covid-19 patients are responding to treatment

Early data on antiviral drug suggests Covid-19 patients are responding to treatment

STAT reports: A Chicago hospital treating severe Covid-19 patients with Gilead Sciences’ antiviral medicine remdesivir in a closely watched clinical trial is seeing rapid recoveries in fever and respiratory symptoms, with nearly all patients discharged in less than a week, STAT has learned. Remdesivir was one of the first medicines identified as having the potential to impact SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that causes Covid-19, in lab tests. The entire world has been waiting for results from Gilead’s clinical trials, and…

Read More Read More

Still too early to determine which potential Covid-19 treatments are effective

Still too early to determine which potential Covid-19 treatments are effective

The Washington Post reports: The journey of EIDD-2801, from laboratory to the mouth of a human, unfolded with head-snapping speed. On March 23, a division of Emory University in Atlanta licensed the experimental drug to a Miami company owned by a wealthy hedge-fund manager and his wife. Just three weeks later, a pill was given to a person for the first time in a test of its safety, in Britain. It marked the beginning of an accelerated testing regimen that…

Read More Read More

Influential Covid-19 model uses flawed methods and shouldn’t guide U.S. policies, critics say

Influential Covid-19 model uses flawed methods and shouldn’t guide U.S. policies, critics say

STAT reports: A widely followed model for projecting Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. is producing results that have been bouncing up and down like an unpredictable fever, and now epidemiologists are criticizing it as flawed and misleading for both the public and policy makers. In particular, they warn against relying on it as the basis for government decision-making, including on “re-opening America.” “It’s not a model that most of us in the infectious disease epidemiology field think is well suited”…

Read More Read More

Emmanuel Macron: The pandemic ‘will change the nature of globalization’

Emmanuel Macron: The pandemic ‘will change the nature of globalization’

The Financial Times reports: Unlike other world leaders, from Donald Trump in the US to Xi Jinping in China, who are trying to return their countries to where they were before the pandemic, the 42-year-old [French president] Mr Macron says he sees the crisis as an existential event for humanity that will change the nature of globalisation and the structure of international capitalism. As a liberal European leader in a world of strident nationalists, Mr Macron says he hopes the…

Read More Read More

U.S. intel warned about outbreak in November but White House ‘did not deem it of interest,’ report says

U.S. intel warned about outbreak in November but White House ‘did not deem it of interest,’ report says

The Times of Israel reports: US intelligence agencies alerted Israel to the coronavirus outbreak in China already in November, Israeli television reported Thursday. According to Channel 12 news, the US intelligence community became aware of the emerging disease in Wuhan in the second week of that month and drew up a classified document. Information on the disease outbreak was not in the public domain at that stage — and was known only apparently to the Chinese government. US intelligence informed…

Read More Read More

EPA regulation changes will weaken controls on mercury and other toxic pollutants

EPA regulation changes will weaken controls on mercury and other toxic pollutants

The New York Times reports: The Trump administration on Thursday weakened regulations on the release of mercury and other toxic metals from oil and coal-fired power plants, another step toward rolling back health protections in the middle of a pandemic. The new Environmental Protection Agency rule does not eliminate restrictions on the release of mercury, a heavy metal linked to brain damage. Instead, it creates a new method of calculating the costs and benefits of curbing mercury pollution that environmental…

Read More Read More