Attention to the Unseen

  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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Politico reports: St. John the Baptist Parish, just southeast of Baton Rouge, La., has a population of just over 43,000 — and the highest per capita coronavirus mortality rate in the nation. Frantic local officials instituted an overnight curfew just this week and are begging residents to stay home. But in largely rural Southern states like Louisiana — where social distancing has been spotty, widespread testing is unavailable and hospitals are poorer and farther apart — the response may be…

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In an editorial, the New York Times says: On Tuesday, hundreds of thousands of voters in Wisconsin will be forced to choose between exercising their constitutional right to vote and safeguarding their own lives, not to mention the lives of their loved ones, their neighbors and poll workers across the state. That’s the predicament in which Republican state lawmakers have placed Wisconsinites — who have been under a stay-at-home order since March 25 — by refusing to agree to postpone…

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Politico reports: The United States will need to produce hundreds of millions of coronavirus tests in order to give parents and students the confidence they need to return to school in the fall, Sen. Lamar Alexander said in an interview on Friday. As chairman for the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, the Republican lawmaker said he is spending his days and nights at home in Tennessee “trying to encourage a Manhattan Project for testing” so that every American…

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Michelle Goldberg writes: Reporting on the White House’s herky-jerky coronavirus response, Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman has a quotation from Jared Kushner that should make all Americans, and particularly all New Yorkers, dizzy with terror. According to Sherman, when New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, said that the state would need 30,000 ventilators at the apex of the coronavirus outbreak, Kushner decided that Cuomo was being alarmist. “I have all this data about I.C.U. capacity,” Kushner reportedly said. “I’m doing my own…

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The Washington Post reports: In the three weeks since declaring the novel coronavirus outbreak a national emergency, President Trump has delivered a dizzying array of rhetorical contortions, sowed confusion and repeatedly sought to cast blame on others. History has never known a crisis response as strong as his own, Trump says — yet the self-described wartime president claims he is merely backup. He has faulted governors for acting too slowly and, as he did Thursday, has accused overwhelmed state and…

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Politico reports: The staggering unemployment exploding on President Donald Trump’s watch would worry any incumbent running for reelection, but troubles in Florida are injecting an added dose of fear into a jittery GOP. Already anxious about Trump’s chances in the nation’s biggest swing state, Republicans now are dealing with thousands of unemployed workers unable to navigate the Florida system to apply for help. And the blowback is directed straight at Trump’s top allies in the state, Gov. Ron DeSantis and…

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The New York Times reports: Speaker Nancy Pelosi, moving aggressively to scrutinize the Trump administration’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, said Thursday that she would seek to create a special bipartisan committee to oversee all aspects of the government’s response, including how it distributes more than $2 trillion in emergency aid. The announcement, which drew immediate objections from President Trump and the top House Republican, came as leaders were struggling to determine how Congress could perform its most basic functions…

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