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The minute details of contact tracing that helped Germany build virus defences

The minute details of contact tracing that helped Germany build virus defences

Reuters reports: One January lunchtime in a car parts company, a worker turned to a colleague and asked to borrow the salt. As well as the saltshaker, in that instant, they shared the new coronavirus, scientists have since concluded. That their exchange was documented at all is the result of intense scrutiny, part of a rare success story in the global fight against the virus. The co-workers were early links in what was to be the first documented chain of…

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How social gatherings were rocket fuel for coronavirus

How social gatherings were rocket fuel for coronavirus

The Guardian reports: On 15 February, a merry crowd wearing clown wigs and jester hats gathered in the town hall of Gangelt, a small western German municipality nestled by the Dutch border, to ring in the peak of the carnival season. Beer and wine flowed aplenty as approximately 350 adults in fancy dress locked arms on long wooden benches and swayed to the rhythm of music provided by a live band. During an interval in the programme, guests got up…

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Pelosi warns Trump not to reopen country too soon

Pelosi warns Trump not to reopen country too soon

Politico reports: Speaker Nancy Pelosi signaled Thursday that the House is unlikely to return to session later this month, her clearest indication yet that Congress — like the rest of the country — could remain shuttered for weeks or even longer as the coronavirus crisis continues. In a half-hour interview, Pelosi issued a stark warning to President Donald Trump, urging him not to prematurely rush to reopen major segments of the country before the coronavirus is under control, which she…

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Mountains of food wasted as coronavirus scrambles supply chain

Mountains of food wasted as coronavirus scrambles supply chain

The Guardian reports: Billions of dollars worth of food is going to waste as growers and producers from California to Florida are facing a massive surplus of highly perishable items. As US food banks handle record demand and grocery stores struggle to keep shelves stocked, farmers are dumping fresh milk and plowing vegetables back into the dirt as the shutdown of the food service industry has scrambled the supply chain. Roughly half the food grown in the US was previously…

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How did America end up with nurses wearing garbage bags?

How did America end up with nurses wearing garbage bags?

Susan B. Glasser writes: On Saturday, March 21st, while Donald Trump was tweeting about the “Chinese virus” and circulating praise for the “great job we’ve done,” Eric Ries received a phone call from another Silicon Valley C.E.O. His friend Jeff Lawson, of the firm Twilio, told Ries that, to deal with the rapidly escalating coronavirus crisis, the White House was recruiting tech executives to help. Ries—the founder and C.E.O. of a new company, the Long-Term Stock Exchange, and the author…

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What Trump’s Covid-19 tsar, Peter Navarro, lacks in expertise, he invents

What Trump’s Covid-19 tsar, Peter Navarro, lacks in expertise, he invents

The Guardian reports: The rise of Peter Navarro – the man put in charge of marshalling emergency US production of medical equipment in the midst of a pandemic – is in many ways a classic story of the Trump era. The 70-year-old White House trade adviser was first recruited by Trump because he wrote a string of books about the Chinese strategic threat – one called Death by China – despite having spent almost no time in the country and…

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How coronavirus felled the global economy in 100 days

How coronavirus felled the global economy in 100 days

Larry Elliott writes: It is New Year’s Eve 2019 and around the world stock markets are closing for business on a high note. Shares in the US are up by almost 30% on the year, those in Japan by 18%. Even in Britain, where the mood has been dampened by months of Brexit uncertainty, the FTSE 100 has risen by 12%. Overall, it had been the best year for stocks since 2009 and traders saw no real reason why the…

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How Europe failed the coronavirus test

How Europe failed the coronavirus test

Politico reports: They could have known. They should have prepared. They didn’t listen. Europe, in early April, remains the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic — where the outbreak, uncontrolled, morphed into catastrophe. Nearly 50,000 dead. More than 600,000 infected. And the devastation is far from over. The world’s largest economy is paralyzed. The planet’s most open societies are frozen in fear — with the Continent’s treasured freedoms blamed for accelerating the spread of the most pernicious contagion to afflict humankind…

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In battling the coronavirus, will ‘optimistic bias’ be our undoing?

In battling the coronavirus, will ‘optimistic bias’ be our undoing?

Unless danger is flashing before us, we view risks through rose-colored glasses. slavemotion/iStock via Getty Images By Marie Helweg-Larsen, Dickinson College As the coronavirus has fanned across the globe, some people have been more complacent about the risk of contracting the virus than others. On March 21, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo was apoplectic after photographs emerged of New Yorkers congregating in parks, apparently ignoring mandates for social distancing. “It’s insensitive, it’s arrogant, it’s self-destructive, it’s disrespectful and it has…

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Trump inspector general firings take aim at rule of law

Trump inspector general firings take aim at rule of law

Noah Feldman writes: In the shadow of the coronavirus pandemic, President Donald Trump is taking ever bolder steps to gut the government structures designed to ensure the rule of law in the United States. In the last week alone, he’s fired two prominent inspectors general: the intelligence community inspector general who received the whistleblower complaint that sparked Trump’s impeachment; and the Defense Department inspector general who had just been named by a group of other inspectors general to oversee the…

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Trump’s daily briefings are hurting him more than helping, aides and allies increasingly believe

Trump’s daily briefings are hurting him more than helping, aides and allies increasingly believe

The New York Times reports: In his daily briefings on the coronavirus, President Trump has brandished all the familiar tools in his rhetorical arsenal: belittling Democratic governors, demonizing the media, trading in innuendo and bulldozing over the guidance of experts. It’s the kind of performance the president relishes, but one that has his advisers and Republican allies worried. As unemployment soars and the death toll skyrockets, and new polls show support for the president’s handling of the crisis sagging, White…

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Gavin Newsom declares California a ‘nation-state’

Gavin Newsom declares California a ‘nation-state’

Francis Wilkinson writes: California this week declared its independence from the federal government’s feeble efforts to fight Covid-19 — and perhaps from a bit more. The consequences for the fight against the pandemic are almost certainly positive. The implications for the brewing civil war between Trumpism and America’s budding 21st-century majority, embodied by California’s multiracial liberal electorate, are less clear. Speaking on MSNBC, Governor Gavin Newsom said that he would use the bulk purchasing power of California “as a nation-state”…

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Fossil find suggests Homo erectus emerged 200,000 years earlier than thought

Fossil find suggests Homo erectus emerged 200,000 years earlier than thought

The ~2 Ma Homo erectus cranium, DNH 134, from the Drimolen Fossil Hominin site. Matthew V. Caruana Stephanie Baker, University of Johannesburg; Angeline Leece; Jesse Martin, La Trobe University; Matthew Caruana, University of Johannesburg; Prof. Andy I.R. Herries, La Trobe University, and Renaud Joannes-Boyau, Southern Cross University The human evolutionary path is complicated. It’s almost impossible to say exactly when we modern humans became “us”. This quandary is best articulated by the famous naturalist Charles Darwin in his book The…

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Intelligence briefing for the White House warned of coronavirus ‘cataclysmic event’ as early as November

Intelligence briefing for the White House warned of coronavirus ‘cataclysmic event’ as early as November

ABC News reports: As far back as late November, U.S. intelligence officials were warning that a contagion was sweeping through China’s Wuhan region, changing the patterns of life and business and posing a threat to the population, according to four sources briefed on the secret reporting. Concerns about what is now known to be the novel coronavirus pandemic were detailed in a November intelligence report by the military’s National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI), according to two officials familiar with…

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