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Demographics of death: Why black Americans are at higher risk for coronavirus

Demographics of death: Why black Americans are at higher risk for coronavirus

  Yesterday, Covid-19 became the leading cause of death in America. CNN reports on its disproportionate impact on African Americans: Black Americans have more existing medical issues, less access to health care, and are more likely to work in unstable jobs — all factors that have made the coronavirus pandemic disproportionately hurt blacks more. While everyone is susceptible to Covid-19, black Americans are at higher risk, Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams said during an appearance on CBS This Morning on…

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Coronavirus is now spreading across rural America

Coronavirus is now spreading across rural America

The New York Times reports: With 42 states now urging people to stay at home, the last holdouts are the Republican governors of North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa and Arkansas. Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota has suggested that the stricter measures violated personal liberties, and she said her state’s rural character made it better positioned to handle the outbreak. “South Dakota is not New York City,” Ms. Noem said at a news conference last week. But many rural…

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Bernie Sanders was right

Bernie Sanders was right

Elizabeth Bruenig writes: Bernie Sanders has ended his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, which is a tragedy, because he was right about virtually everything. He was right from the very beginning, when he advocated a total overhaul of the American health care system in the 1970s. He remains right now, as a pandemic stresses the meager resources of millions of citizens to their breaking point, and possibly to their death. He was right when he seemed to be the…

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The best hopes for a coronavirus drug

The best hopes for a coronavirus drug

The Atlantic reports: Twenty-nine. That’s the number of proteins the new coronavirus has, at most, in its arsenal to attack human cells. That’s 29 proteins to go up against upwards of tens of thousands of proteins comprising the vastly more complex and sophisticated human body. Twenty-nine proteins that have taken over enough cells in enough bodies to kill more than 80,000 people and grind the world to a halt. If there is a way—a vaccine, therapy, or drug—to stop the…

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Boris Johnson listened to his scientists about coronavirus – but they were slow to sound the alarm

Boris Johnson listened to his scientists about coronavirus – but they were slow to sound the alarm

Reuters reports: It was early spring when British scientists laid out the bald truth to their government. It was “highly likely,” they said, that there was now “sustained transmission” of COVID-19 in the United Kingdom. If unconstrained and if the virus behaved as in China, up to four-fifths of Britons could be infected and one in a hundred might die, wrote the scientists, members of an official committee set up to model the spread of pandemic flu, on March 2….

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How viruses are a hidden driving force controlling the planet

How viruses are a hidden driving force controlling the planet

A re-post of an article that appeared in January at Inside Science: Viruses control their hosts like puppets — and in the process, they may play important roles in Earth’s climate. The hosts in this case aren’t people or animals: They are bacteria. A growing body of research is revealing how viruses manipulate what bacteria eat and how they guide the chemical reactions that sustain life. When those changes happen to a lot of bacteria, the cumulative effects could potentially…

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New Zealand isn’t just flattening the curve. It’s squashing it

New Zealand isn’t just flattening the curve. It’s squashing it

The Washington Post reports: It has been less than two weeks since New Zealand imposed a coronavirus lockdown so strict that swimming at the beach and hunting in bushland were banned. They’re not essential activities, plus we have been told not to do anything that could divert emergency services’ resources. People have been walking and biking strictly in their neighborhoods, lining up six feet apart outside grocery stores while waiting to go one-in-one-out, and joining swaths of the world in…

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Politicians and public figures return to medical careers to help coronavirus effort

Politicians and public figures return to medical careers to help coronavirus effort

The Guardian reports: An Irish prime minister, a French film director and a Hungarian MEP are among the public figures who are resurrecting their medical careers to fight the coronavirus pandemic. They are part of a small, growing group of people in politics, the arts and sports who are becoming doctors again to help health care systems under unprecedented strain. Leo Varadkar, Ireland’s taoiseach, has offered to work one day a week as a doctor as his country braces for…

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How Andrew Cuomo became the most prominent Democrat of the Covid-19 crisis

How Andrew Cuomo became the most prominent Democrat of the Covid-19 crisis

The Guardian reports: It’s rare for a single US state governor to get so much attention it even rivals the president during a historical national crisis – but that’s exactly what New York’s Andrew Cuomo is experiencing. Cuomo, the technocratic three-term governor who’s had to deal with the state hit hardest by the coronavirus pandemic, has emerged as the most prominent Democrat in charge of fighting the virus, filling a role many felt former vice-president Joe Biden should be occupying….

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As Trump played down the risks, his own trade adviser warned in January about the danger of a pandemic

As Trump played down the risks, his own trade adviser warned in January about the danger of a pandemic

The New York Times reports: A top White House adviser starkly warned Trump administration officials in late January that the coronavirus crisis could cost the United States trillions of dollars and put millions of Americans at risk of illness or death. The warning, written in a memo by Peter Navarro, President Trump’s trade adviser, is the highest-level alert known to have circulated inside the West Wing as the administration was taking its first substantive steps to confront a crisis that…

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Why Republicans pushed for ‘the most undemocratic’ election in Wisconsin’s history

Why Republicans pushed for ‘the most undemocratic’ election in Wisconsin’s history

The New York Times reports: Tuesday’s mess of an election in Wisconsin is the culmination of a decade of efforts by state Republicans to make voting harder, redraw legislative boundaries and dilute the power of voters in the state’s urban centers. The Republican-dominated state legislature, which has held a majority since 2011, due in part to gerrymandered maps, refused to entertain the Democratic governor’s request to mail absentee ballots to all voters or move the primary. Then the State Supreme…

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As a champion of hydroxychloroquine treatment for Covid-19, Trump promotes hope even if it’s baseless

As a champion of hydroxychloroquine treatment for Covid-19, Trump promotes hope even if it’s baseless

The New York Times reports: Day after day, the salesman turned president has encouraged coronavirus patients to try hydroxychloroquine with all of the enthusiasm of a real estate developer. The passing reference he makes to the possible dangers is usually overwhelmed by the full-throated endorsement. “What do you have to lose?” he asked five times on Sunday. Bolstered by his trade adviser, a television doctor, Larry Ellison of Oracle and Rudolph W. Giuliani, a former New York mayor, Mr. Trump…

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The danger with Trump serving as risk-manager-in-chief

The danger with Trump serving as risk-manager-in-chief

Vox reports: The Trump administration’s failures in dealing with a global pandemic threat raise a frightening, but important, question: How else is this administration putting the United States at risk right now? And what is this administration neglecting in 2020 that will put Americans at risk five, 10, 20 years from now? In 2017, Michael Lewis, author of books like The Big Short, Moneyball, and The Blind Side, began asking these very same questions — and arrived at some startling…

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Andrew Cuomo for president? Joe Biden can and should make it happen

Andrew Cuomo for president? Joe Biden can and should make it happen

Craig Snyder writes: Donald Trump’s current term as president ends at noon on January 20, 2021. As strange as it may seem at this time of exclusive focus on our public health and economic emergencies, a vital national election is still coming. I have been a Republican candidate for Congress, a GOP staffer in the Senate and a business partner of Roger Stone when he conceived of and managed Donald Trump‘s first campaign for President (seeking the nomination of the…

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