Music: Lee Morgan Quintet — ‘Ceora’
The pandemic may get much, much worse. We must act now
John M. Barry writes: When you mix science and politics, you get politics. With the coronavirus, the United States has proved politics hasn’t worked. If we are to fully reopen both the economy and schools safely — which can be done — we have to return to science. To understand just how bad things are in the United States and, more important, what can be done about it requires comparison. At this writing, Italy, once the poster child of coronavirus…
New Biden plan sees millions of jobs in aggressive climate action
The Verge reports: On Wednesday, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden revealed a revamped climate and energy plan that raises spending, expands efforts to address racial disparities, and sets an earlier deadline for cutting greenhouse gases. Biden’s plan aims to eliminate carbon pollution from the power sector by 2035. Biden had previously committed to reaching a 100 percent “clean energy economy” by 2050. The plan comes with a $2 trillion price tag over four years, higher than his previous ten-year…
Aerosols are a bigger coronavirus threat than WHO guidelines suggest – here’s what you need to know
Aerosols are made up of tiny respiratory droplets suspended in the air. Jeffrey Coolidge via Getty Images Byron Erath, Clarkson University; Andrea Ferro, Clarkson University, and Goodarz Ahmadi, Clarkson University When someone coughs, talks or even breathes, they send tiny respiratory droplets into the surrounding air. The smallest of these droplets can float for hours, and there is strong evidence that they can carry live coronavirus if the person is infected. Until this week, however, the risk from these aerosols…
We ran the CDC. No president ever politicized its science the way Trump has
Tom Frieden, Jeffrey Koplan, David Satcher and Richard Besser write: As America begins the formidable task of getting our kids back to school and all of us back to work safely amid a pandemic that is only getting worse, public health experts face two opponents: covid-19, but also political leaders and others attempting to undermine the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As the debate last week around reopening schools more safely showed, these repeated efforts to subvert sound public…
Trump mired in self-pity as polls sink and pandemic worsens
Bloomberg reports: President Donald Trump swept to power by championing the hardships of forgotten men and women, but his re-election bid has so far centered on the plight of just one person: himself. Trump is struggling to respond to a resurgent pandemic, an economic downturn and nationwide protests for racial justice. The coronavirus has weakened the central plank of his campaign — the economy — while mostly scuttling the rallies that he thrives on. While all those crises raged, Trump…
Focusing on charging Amy Cooper lets white people off the hook
Christian Cooper writes: On May 25, when I was birding in the Ramble section of New York’s Central Park, I asked a woman whose dog was off his leash to please put him back on, as the area’s rules require. She refused — and, as shown in a video that went viral, she was soon calling the police and telling them an “African American man” was “threatening” her. Now Amy Cooper has been charged by the Manhattan district attorney with…
Elite hospitals have an epidemic of greed
Washington Monthly reports: In early March, public health officials issued warnings about what the spreading coronavirus could mean for the Pittsburgh region. Debra Bogen, director of the health department for surrounding Allegheny County, forecast that between 40 to 60 percent of the adults in western Pennsylvania could come down with COVID-19 unless strong mitigation measures were taken. The Harvard Global Health Institute predicted that Pittsburgh-area hospitals could need between 480 to 720 percent more beds than were currently available. Meanwhile,…
Music: Wes Montgomery — ‘Impressions’
The Anglo-America flailing states
Pankaj Mishra writes: ‘The abyss of history is deep enough to hold us all,’ Paul Valéry wrote in 1919, as Europe lay in ruins. The words resonate today as the coronavirus blows the roof off the world, most brutally exposing Britain and the United States, these prime movers of modern civilisation, which proudly claimed victory in two world wars, and in the Cold War, and which until recently held themselves up as exemplars of enlightened progress, economic and cultural models…
Anne Applebaum: How my old friends paved the way for Trump and Brexit
Nick Cohen writes: Anne Applebaum can look at the wreck of democratic politics and understand it with a completeness few contemporary writers can match. When she asks who sent Britain into the unending Brexit crisis, or inflicted the Trump administration on America, or turned Poland and Hungary into one-party states, she does not need to search press cuttings. Her friends did it, she replies. Or, rather, her former friends. For if they are now embarrassed to have once known her,…
Mary Trump has not indicted her uncle. She has indicted the whole family
Michael Kruse writes: Donald Trump is the damaged product of an absent mother and a sociopathic father. That’s in essence Mary Trump’s assessment in her ultra-anticipated instant bestseller that’s due out Tuesday—Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man. For anybody who’s done the reading these last five years—from Wayne Barrett’s biography that was published in 1992 to Gwenda Blair’s multigenerational study from 2000 to psychology experts’ more recent efforts to explain this president—it’s…
Immunity to Covid-19 could be lost in months, UK study suggests
The Guardian reports: People who have recovered from Covid-19 may lose their immunity to the disease within months, according to research suggesting the virus could reinfect people year after year, like common colds. In the first longitudinal study of its kind, scientists analysed the immune response of more than 90 patients and healthcare workers at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS foundation trust and found levels of antibodies that can destroy the virus peaked about three weeks after the onset of…
Larry Brilliant on how well we are fighting Covid-19
WIRED interviews epidemiologist, Larry Brilliant: WIRED: We talked 100 days ago. What is different about the pandemic now? Larry Brilliant: A hundred days ago we didn’t really understand the pathophysiology—the way the virus and the human body interact, the illness as opposed to the epidemic. The unexpected things that it’s doing are not epidemiological—they are virological. In March, we were just beginning to see these horrific CT scans or x-rays of people with ARDS, acute respiratory distress syndrome, where they…
The role of cognitive dissonance in the pandemic
Elliot Aronson and Carol Tavris write: Members of Heaven’s Gate, a religious cult, believed that as the Hale-Bopp comet passed by Earth in 1997, a spaceship would be traveling in its wake—ready to take true believers aboard. Several members of the group bought an expensive, high-powered telescope so that they might get a clearer view of the comet. They quickly brought it back and asked for a refund. When the manager asked why, they complained that the telescope was defective,…
In awe we hold fast to nature’s strangeness and open up to the unknown
Helen De Cruz writes: When a scientific paradigm breaks down, scientists need to make a leap into the unknown. These are moments of revolution, as identified by Thomas Kuhn in the 1960s, when the scientists’ worldview becomes untenable and the agreed-upon and accepted truths of a particular discipline are radically called into question. Beloved theories are revealed to have been built upon sand. Explanations that held up for hundreds of years are now dismissed. A particular and productive way of…