Attention to the Unseen

By Stephen Duckett, Grattan Institute and Tom Crowley, Grattan Institute If the past few months have been like a long-haul flight, Victorians are now standing in the aisles waiting for the cabin door to open, a little groggy and disoriented but relieved. They have every right to be. No other place in the world has tamed a second wave this large. Few have even come close. Read more: Of all the places that have seen off a second coronavirus wave,…

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Business restrictions early in the pandemic, when rural towns had few cases, triggered a backlash that haunts them now. Johannes Eisele/AFP/Getty Images By Lauren Hughes, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus and Roberto Silva, University of Colorado Denver As COVID-19 spreads through rural America, new infection numbers are rising to peaks not seen during this pandemic and pushing hospitals to their limits. Many towns are experiencing their first major outbreaks, but that doesn’t mean rural communities had previously been spared…

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The Wall Street Journal reports: A federal health agency halted a public-service coronavirus advertising campaign funded by $250 million in taxpayer money after it offered a special vaccine deal to an unusual set of essential workers: Santa Claus performers. As part of the plan, a top Trump administration official wanted the Santa performers to promote the benefits of a Covid-19 vaccination and, in exchange, offered them early vaccine access ahead of the general public, according to audio recordings. Those who…

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CNN reports: White House chief of staff Mark Meadows said Sunday that the US is “not going to control” the coronavirus pandemic, as cases surge across the country and nearly 225,000 Americans have died from the virus. “We are not going to control the pandemic. We are going to control the fact that we get vaccines, therapeutics and other mitigation areas,” Meadows told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union.” The comments from President Donald Trump’s chief of staff…

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Politico reports: Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short, tested positive for Covid-19 on Saturday, a sign of the virus hitting the inner circle of the White House’s coronavirus task force with just 10 days left in the 2020 election. Pence, who tested negative Saturday, will continue to headline campaign events in the coming days even though the vice president’s office acknowledged he “is considered a close contact” with Short. Pence “will maintain his schedule in accordance with…

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USA Today reports: As President Donald Trump jetted across the country holding campaign rallies during the past two months, he didn’t just defy state orders and federal health guidelines. He left a trail of coronavirus outbreaks in his wake. The president has participated in nearly three dozen rallies since mid-August, all but two at airport hangars. A USA TODAY analysis shows COVID-19 cases grew at a faster rate than before after at least five of those rallies in the following…

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The Washington Post reports: The start of President Trump’s rally was still hours away when it became clear that his campaign would not keep its promise. In the days leading up to the Sept. 30 event in Duluth, Minn., local officials had privately pressed the campaign to abide by state public health guidelines aimed at slowing the spread of the novel coronavirus, documents show. In response, the campaign signed an agreement pledging to follow those rules, limiting attendance to 250…

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The Washington Post reports: America is poised to enter the worst stretch ever of the coronavirus pandemic, with cases spiking and the country on the precipice of shattering its daily record for infections in the next few days. The current surge is already considerably more widespread than the waves from last summer and spring. On Thursday, the number of cases topped 70,000 for the first time since July. The unprecedented geographic spread of the current surge makes it especially dangerous,…

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The Washington Post reports: As summer faded into autumn and the novel coronavirus continued to ravage the nation unabated, Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist whose commentary on Fox News led President Trump to recruit him to the White House, consolidated his power over the government’s pandemic response. Atlas shot down attempts to expand testing. He openly feuded with other doctors on the coronavirus task force and succeeded in largely sidelining them. He advanced fringe theories, such as that social distancing and…

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John Harris writes: Just as [Britain’s] final exit from the EU comes into view, noise from the media and politics about Covid-19 is sounding discomfortingly similar to the furies that erupted around the 2016 referendum. On one side stands the political right, opposed to lockdown, apparently spurning the advice of experts, and seemingly convinced that a mixture of true-Brit common sense and derring-do will somehow see us through. The left, meanwhile, emphasises the importance of “the science”, and the prospect…

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