Attention to the Unseen

HuffPost reports: Most Americans consider wearing a mask near others a sign of respect and a matter of public health, a new HuffPost/YouGov poll finds. In recent weeks, President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence’s frequent eschewal of masks, combined with a few high-profile incidents of public protest, have seemingly threatened to turn the issue into another front for partisan hostilities. But public opinion on masks, like other aspects of the coronavirus crisis, doesn’t fit neatly into the hyperpolarized…

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Julia Marcus writes: In the earliest years of the HIV epidemic, confusion and fear reigned. AIDS was still known as the “gay plague.” To the extent that gay men received any health advice at all, it was to avoid sex. In 1983, the activists Richard Berkowitz and Michael Callen, with guidance from the virologist Joseph Sonnabend, published a foundational document for their community, called “How to Have Sex in an Epidemic.” Recognizing the need for pleasure in people’s lives, the…

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The Washington Post reports: Half of New Zealand’s cabinet gathered this past Monday morning in the round meeting room on the top floor of the Beehive, the tiered 1970s landmark here that houses the government’s executive branch. The other half called in on Zoom. Running the meeting was Jacinda Ardern, the liberal prime minister who has won international renown for her empathetic leadership during the global coronavirus pandemic. Next to her was Winston Peters, the wily politician almost twice her…

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The New York Times reports: By late March, nearly every country in Europe had closed schools and businesses, restricted travel and ordered citizens to stay home. But one country stood out for its decision to stay open: Sweden. The country’s moderated response to the coronavirus outbreak has drawn praise from some American politicians, who see Sweden as a possible model for the United States as it begins to reopen. “We need to observe with an open mind what went on…

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Jia Tolentino writes: We are not accustomed to destruction looking, at first, like emptiness. The coronavirus pandemic is disorienting in part because it defies our normal cause-and-effect shortcuts to understanding the world. The source of danger is invisible; the most effective solution involves willing paralysis; we won’t know the consequences of today’s actions until two weeks have passed. Everything circles a bewildering paradox: other people are both a threat and a lifeline. Physical connection could kill us, but civic connection…

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Politico reports: President Donald Trump wants to draft every American to go to war. Encouraging the public to transition out of isolation and into the world, the president is increasingly deploying battlefield rhetoric in asking everyday Americans to confront a raging coronavirus pandemic that has already infected 1.3 million people in the U.S. and killed nearly 80,000 — and this week clawed into the inner circle of his White House. “The people of our country should think of themselves as…

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Máximo Torero write: The coronavirus pandemic has laid many things bare, none more so than how interconnected our world is. The impact of globalization is most obvious in the stuttering supply chains that threaten food security worldwide. Maintaining or reweaving these webs is going to take technology, innovation and political determination. As chief economist at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), I fear that few countries have recognized that their measures to contain the virus and…

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The Washington Post reports: Hispanics are nearly twice as likely as whites to have lost their jobs amid the coronavirus shutdowns, according to a Washington Post-Ipsos poll, underlining that the pandemic is wreaking a disproportionate toll on some racial and ethnic groups. The poll finds that 20 percent of Hispanic adults and 16 percent of blacks report being laid off or furloughed since the outbreak began in the United States, compared with 11 percent of whites and 12 percent of…

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The Associated Press reports: Black people have been dying at alarming rates across the country: the latest Associated Press analysis of available data shows that African Americans represent about 14% of the population in the areas covered but nearly one-third of those who have died. By nearly every measure, coronavirus patients are faring worse in rural Georgia than almost anywhere else in America, according to researchers at Emory University in Atlanta. Although New York City had thousands more deaths, the…

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Politico reports: Counties across the country with a disproportionate number of African-American residents accounted for 52 percent of diagnoses and 58 percent of coronavirus deaths nationally, according to a new study released Tuesday. The study, conducted by epidemiologists and clinician-researchers at four universities in conjunction with the nonprofit AIDS research organization amFar and PATH’s Center for Vaccine Innovation and Access, attempts to fill in the blanks as states report piecemeal data on race and ethnicity. The Centers for Disease Control…

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The New York Times reports on Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and New York’s 14th Congressional District: The wreckage in her community has made a darkly eloquent case, she said, for her agenda of universal health care and less income inequity. “This crisis is not really creating new problems,” she said. “It’s pouring gasoline on our existing ones.” But more personally, it has exposed the little-seen vulnerabilities and isolation of the most prominent new voice in Congress. A case in point: Ms….

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