Attention to the Unseen

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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