Attention to the Unseen

The New York Times reports: For weeks, President Trump has minimized the coronavirus, mocked concern about it and treated the risk cavalierly. On Tuesday he took to the White House podium and made a remarkable pronouncement: He knew it was a pandemic all along. “I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic,” Mr. Trump told reporters. Here is what Mr. Trump actually said from the beginning of the pandemic. Jan. 22, asked on CNBC whether…

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Politico reports: Seven days before Donald Trump took office, his aides faced a major test: the rapid, global spread of a dangerous virus in cities like London and Seoul, one serious enough that some countries were imposing travel bans. In a sober briefing, Trump’s incoming team learned that the disease was an emerging pandemic — a strain of novel influenza known as H9N2 — and that health systems were crashing in Asia, overwhelmed by the demand. “Health officials warn that…

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President Donald Trump with members of the president’s Coronavirus Task Force at the White House, Wednesday, Feb. 26, 2020. AP Photo/Evan Vucci By Simon F. Haeder, Pennsylvania State University As the coronavirus pandemic exerts a tighter grip on the nation, critics of the Trump administration have repeatedly highlighted the administration’s changes to the nation’s pandemic response team in 2018 as a major contributor to the current crisis. This combines with a hiring freeze at the Centers for Disease Control and…

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Politico reports: Just two weeks after President Donald Trump rallied conservatives to focus on the threat of socialism, his followers are splitting over the coronavirus pandemic. On one side are those like Bill Mitchell, who dismiss it as nothing worse than the flu, and the drive to eradicate it as “climate change 2.0” — as in, a media-lefty mass hysteria. On the other side are pro-Trump fixtures like Trump campaign adviser Jason Miller, who have been sounding alarms on the…

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Politico reports: Welcome to politics’ darkest hour. If the coronavirus outbreak has taught us anything beyond the necessity of careful hygiene, it’s that the first victim of a pandemic is leadership. At no time in the past 75 years has the world been in more need of a “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” moment; and at no time have global leaders so utterly failed to deliver. From Beijing to Brussels, from Rome to Washington, London…

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BuzzFeed reports: The UK only realised “in the last few days” that attempts to “mitigate” the impact of the coronavirus pandemic would not work, and that it needed to shift to a strategy to “suppress” the outbreak, according to a report by a team of experts who have been advising the government. The report, published by the Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team on Monday night, found that the strategy previously being pursued by the government — dubbed “mitigation” and involving…

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Anne Applebaum writes: At the moment, many Americans are still convinced that, even in this crisis, our society is more capable than others. Quite a lot was written about the terrifying and reckless behavior of the authorities in Wuhan, China, who initially threatened doctors who began posting information about the new virus, forcing them into silence. On the very day that one of those doctors, Li Wenliang, contracted the virus, the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission issued a statement declaring,“So far…

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Cheryl Benard writes: Like thousands of Americans and Europeans scrambling to get to the United States before the travel ban went into effect and flights were canceled, I flew back to the United States from Vienna on Friday. Arriving at Dulles International Airport via London, I encountered a case study in how to spread a pandemic. I had thought I was lucky to get one of the last seats home. And I was confident, because Dulles had been identified by…

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In a letter addressed to President Trump, Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, writes: [Y]ou must anticipate that, without immediate action, the imminent failure of hospital systems is all but certain. According to one projection, as many as 214 million people in our country could be infected over the course of the epidemic. Of those, as many as 21 million people could require hospitalization. This would crush the nation’s medical system. New York State has just 53,470 hospital beds,…

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The New York Times reports: The Trump administration has been working to relax regulations governing America’s nursing homes, including rules meant to curb deadly infections among elderly residents. The main federal regulator overseeing nursing homes proposed the rule changes last summer, before the coronavirus pandemic highlighted the vulnerability of nursing homes to fast-spreading diseases. The push followed a spate of lobbying and campaign contributions by people in the nursing-home industry, according to public records and interviews. The coronavirus has killed…

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Wired reports: This pandemic—the new disease Covid-19, the virus SARS-CoV-2—is not Singapore’s first epidemiological nightmare. In 2002 and 2003, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, the original SARS, tore out of China and through Asia, killing 33 people in Singapore and sparking wholesale revisions to the city-state’s public health system. “They realized they wanted to invest for the future, to reduce that economic cost if the same thing were to happen again,” says Martin Hibberd, an infectious disease researcher now at the…

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The New York Times reports: David Norton, who helps to run a community center in this small Rhode Island city, is not a scientist. Neither were the board members who gathered for an emergency meeting last week, to decide whether the risk of contagion meant they should cancel their upcoming events. They sat together — a nurse, a civil servant, a therapist, an insurance executive — and tried to decode the guidance given by state and federal authorities. Rhode Island’s…

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