Attention to the Unseen

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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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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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 Guardian reports: On Wednesday, Three Rivers, a small hospital in rural Washington, had exactly nine days left before it would run out of money to pay its staff and be forced to close. That same day, its CEO learned the hospital likely had its first coronavirus patient. The coronavirus pandemic has put a strain even on the wealthier parts of America’s vast, fragmented healthcare system: there are not enough beds, not enough ventilators, not enough protective equipment. But in…

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The Washington Post reports: By the time Donald Trump proclaimed himself a wartime president — and the coronavirus the enemy — the United States was already on course to see more of its people die than in the wars of Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq combined. The country has adopted an array of wartime measures never employed collectively in U.S. history — banning incoming travelers from two continents, bringing commerce to a near-halt, enlisting industry to make emergency medical gear,…

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Lloyd Green writes: On Sunday, initially at least, there was no White House briefing on the president’s public schedule. But the bad news kept coming. Coronavirus deaths continued to climb and reports of the heartland being unprepared for what may be on its horizon continued to ricochet around the media. In the words of one administration insider, to the Guardian: “The Trump organism is simply collapsing. He’s killing his own supporters.” Members of the national guard, emergency workers, rank-and-file Americans:…

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The New York Times reports: A coroner in Indiana wanted to know if the coronavirus had killed a man in early March, but said that her health department denied a test. Paramedics in New York City say that many patients who died at home were never tested for the coronavirus, even if they showed telltale signs of infection. In Virginia, a funeral director prepared the remains of three people after health workers cautioned her that they each had tested positive…

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  ABC News reports: In the summer of 2005, President George W. Bush was on vacation at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, when he began flipping through an advance reading copy of a new book about the 1918 flu pandemic. He couldn’t put it down. When he returned to Washington, he called his top homeland security adviser into the Oval Office and gave her the galley of historian John M. Barry’s “The Great Influenza,” which told the chilling tale of…

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The Associated Press reports: As the first alarms sounded in early January that an outbreak of a novel coronavirus in China might ignite a global pandemic, the Trump administration squandered nearly two months that could have been used to bolster the federal stockpile of critically needed medical supplies and equipment. A review of federal purchasing contracts by The Associated Press shows federal agencies largely waited until mid-March to begin placing bulk orders of N95 respirator masks, mechanical ventilators and other…

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John Harris writes: Last week, Boris Johnson stood on a set of stairs inside 10 Downing Street and spoke into a smartphone camera. Towards the end of a two-and-half minute monologue about Covid-19 and the national response to it, he said something striking: “One thing I think [the] coronavirus crisis has already proved is that there really is such a thing as society.” The words, if anyone missed the reference, were an allusion to an infamous few sentences from Margaret…

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Foreign Policy reports: The United States is now an epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic, with epidemiological models publicized on Tuesday suggesting the disease could infect millions of Americans in the coming months, killing between 100,000 and 240,000. Hospitals in the state of New York, where there are more than 75,000 confirmed cases, are already overwhelmed and experiencing shortages of critical medical equipment such as ventilators and protective gear. The grim projections indicate that the virus has not reached its peak…

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The New York Times reports: They call them corona taxis: Medics outfitted in protective gear, driving around the empty streets of Heidelberg to check on patients who are at home, five or six days into being sick with the coronavirus. They take a blood test, looking for signs that a patient is about to go into a steep decline. They might suggest hospitalization, even to a patient who has only mild symptoms; the chances of surviving that decline are vastly…

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