Attention to the Unseen

The Washington Post reports: Sheryl Means already has lost so much to the invisible virus burning through her hometown. Her mother and her aunt died within days of each other. Her sister has been on a ventilator for weeks in a hospital miles away, and there are no visitors allowed in the covid-19 isolation unit. She has this tightness in her chest, and she’s scared she might be next. But Means can’t get a test. Even now, six weeks into…

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The Guardian reports: Only a tiny proportion of the global population – maybe as few as 2% or 3% – appear to have antibodies in the blood showing they have been infected with Covid-19, according to the World Health Organization, a finding that bodes ill for hopes that herd immunity will ease the exit from lockdown. “Easing restrictions is not the end of the epidemic in any country,” said WHO director-general Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus at a media briefing in…

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The Associated Press reports: President Donald Trump has made himself the daily spokesman for the nation’s coronavirus response. Yet few Americans regularly look to or trust Trump as a source of information on the pandemic, according to a new survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Just 28% of Americans say they’re regularly getting information from Trump about the coronavirus and only 23% say they have high levels of trust in what the president is telling the…

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The New York Times reports: Every day, Constance Warren stands behind the cold cuts counter at a grocery store in New Orleans, watching the regular customers come and go. They thank Ms. Warren and tell her they do not like being stuck indoors, waiting out the epidemic. She wraps their honey-smoked turkey and smiles. It is good to have a job right now, the mixed fortune of being deemed an essential worker. But she wonders whether, once everyday life is…

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Richard Power Sayeed writes: In the middle of the 14th century, the Black Death killed perhaps a third of Europe’s population, hastening the breakdown of rigid social hierarchies – what we now call “feudalism” – to an astonishing degree. But there was nothing inevitable about that transformation. It happened because people such as William Caburn exploited the crisis. Two years after the plague hit England, this Lincolnshire ploughman was in court for “refusing to work at the daily rate”. He…

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Alexander W. Cappelen, Ranveig Falch, Erik O. Sorensen, Bertil Tungodden and Gus Wezerek write: America will almost certainly emerge from the coronavirus pandemic as a different society. A new survey suggests the experience has already changed what we believe we owe our neighbors and how much economic inequality we find acceptable. Seeking to understand how the crisis might affect Americans’ moral perspectives, Times Opinion partnered with Alexander W. Cappelen, Ranveig Falch, Erik O. Sorensen and Bertil Tungodden at FAIR —…

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David Wallace-Wells writes: We are, finally, beginning to see some real plans from people with the power to enact them. On Tuesday, California governor Gavin Newsom unveiled a sort of road map for a gradual “reopening” of the state — including benchmarks for testing and hospital capacity, and continued social-distancing guidelines and even temperature checks. A handful of serious, sobering national proposals have been put forward by think tanks and the like in the U.S., and the White House has…

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Pew Research Center reports: As the death toll from the novel coronavirus pandemic continues to spiral, most Americans do not foresee a quick end to the crisis. In fact, 73% say that in thinking about the problems the country is facing from the coronavirus outbreak, the worst is still to come. With the Trump administration and many state governors actively considering ways to revive the stalled U.S. economy, the public strikes a decidedly cautious note on easing strict limits on…

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Reuters reports: The United States may need to endure social distancing measures adopted during the coronavirus outbreak until 2022, according to researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health. The study comes as more than 2,200 people died in the United States from the outbreak on Tuesday, a record, according to a Reuters tally, even as the country debated how to reopen its economy. The overall death toll in the U.S. from the virus stands at more than 28,300 as…

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