Music: Tom Misch, Yussef Dayes & Rocco Palladino — ‘Lift Off’
He could have seen what was coming: Behind Trump’s failure on the pandemic
The New York Times reports: “Any way you cut it, this is going to be bad,” a senior medical adviser at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Dr. Carter Mecher, wrote on the night of Jan. 28, in an email to a group of public health experts scattered around the government and universities. “The projected size of the outbreak already seems hard to believe.” A week after the first coronavirus case had been identified in the United States, and six long…
Experts fear ‘national naivete’ on Covid-19 optimism
The Hill reports: After an unprecedented month of strict social distancing and an economic lockdown that has cost tens of millions of jobs and untold billions in damage, Americans saw the faintest glimmers of hope last week that the worst of the coronavirus crisis may be passing. Modelers at the University of Washington downgraded their projections of the number of people who would die. Some states closed field hospitals they never had to use. Major professional sports leagues began considering…
In six days more Americans died from Covid-19 than died from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq combined
Business Insider reports: The US has become the first country in the world to record more than 2,000 coronavirus deaths in a single day. 2,108 people lost their lives on Friday, according to data collated by researchers at Johns Hopkins University. The US also surpassed half a million infections at the end of what has been a devastating week. More Americans died between Monday and Saturday (8,800) than died from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq combined. The US death…
The Trump administration has many task forces — but still no plan for beating the coronavirus crisis
The Washington Post reports: The Trump administration still has no clear plan for ending the coronavirus crisis, but it does have many task forces. There is the official task force led by Vice President Pence that meets daily and is supposed to oversee the government’s sprawling response to the deadly pandemic that has cratered the economy and, as of Saturday, killed more than 19,000 in the United States alone. There is the “Opening Our Country Council,” an economic task force…
White House rejects bailout for U.S. Postal Service battered by coronavirus
The Washington Post reports: Through rain, sleet, hail, and even a pandemic, mail carriers serve every address in the United States, but the coronavirus crisis is shaking the foundation of the U.S. Postal Service in new and dire ways. The Postal Service’s decades-long financial troubles have worsened dramatically as the volume of the kind of mail that pays the agency’s bills ― first-class and marketing mail ― withers during the pandemic. The USPS needs an infusion of money, and President…
The lethal toll of not shutting down spring break earlier
The New York Times reports: You could find Beatriz Diaz at this spring’s Winter Party Festival in Miami Beach, giving out hand sanitizer. It was early March. She knew the coronavirus was beginning to make its way around the world, but she figured if she kept her hands clean and avoided sweaty people, she would be safe. “I was thinking, ‘OK, well, hold on, the government did not cancel it, so it should be fine,’” she said. Within days, reports…
Trump is draining the last reserves of decency among us at a time when we need it most
Tom Nichols writes: Trump is a spiritual black hole. He has no ability to transcend himself by so much as an emotional nanometer. Even narcissists, we are told by psychologists, have the occasional dark night of the soul. They can recognize how they are perceived by others, and they will at least pretend to seek forgiveness and show contrition as a way of gaining the affection they need. They are capable of infrequent moments of reflection, even if only to…
Music: Roberto Di Gioia’s Marsmobil — ‘Crazy 5’
‘Very aggressive’ contact tracing needed for U.S. to return to normal, says CDC director
NPR reports: It’s the question on everyone’s minds: What will it take for us to come out of this period of extreme social distancing and return to some semblance of normal life? It turns out that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been working on a plan to allow the U.S. to safely begin to scale back those policies. CDC Director Robert Redfield spoke with NPR on Thursday, saying that the plan relies on not only ramped-up testing…
The minute details of contact tracing that helped Germany build virus defences
Reuters reports: One January lunchtime in a car parts company, a worker turned to a colleague and asked to borrow the salt. As well as the saltshaker, in that instant, they shared the new coronavirus, scientists have since concluded. That their exchange was documented at all is the result of intense scrutiny, part of a rare success story in the global fight against the virus. The co-workers were early links in what was to be the first documented chain of…
How social gatherings were rocket fuel for coronavirus
The Guardian reports: On 15 February, a merry crowd wearing clown wigs and jester hats gathered in the town hall of Gangelt, a small western German municipality nestled by the Dutch border, to ring in the peak of the carnival season. Beer and wine flowed aplenty as approximately 350 adults in fancy dress locked arms on long wooden benches and swayed to the rhythm of music provided by a live band. During an interval in the programme, guests got up…
Pelosi warns Trump not to reopen country too soon
Politico reports: Speaker Nancy Pelosi signaled Thursday that the House is unlikely to return to session later this month, her clearest indication yet that Congress — like the rest of the country — could remain shuttered for weeks or even longer as the coronavirus crisis continues. In a half-hour interview, Pelosi issued a stark warning to President Donald Trump, urging him not to prematurely rush to reopen major segments of the country before the coronavirus is under control, which she…
Mountains of food wasted as coronavirus scrambles supply chain
The Guardian reports: Billions of dollars worth of food is going to waste as growers and producers from California to Florida are facing a massive surplus of highly perishable items. As US food banks handle record demand and grocery stores struggle to keep shelves stocked, farmers are dumping fresh milk and plowing vegetables back into the dirt as the shutdown of the food service industry has scrambled the supply chain. Roughly half the food grown in the US was previously…
How did America end up with nurses wearing garbage bags?
Susan B. Glasser writes: On Saturday, March 21st, while Donald Trump was tweeting about the “Chinese virus” and circulating praise for the “great job we’ve done,” Eric Ries received a phone call from another Silicon Valley C.E.O. His friend Jeff Lawson, of the firm Twilio, told Ries that, to deal with the rapidly escalating coronavirus crisis, the White House was recruiting tech executives to help. Ries—the founder and C.E.O. of a new company, the Long-Term Stock Exchange, and the author…
What Trump’s Covid-19 tsar, Peter Navarro, lacks in expertise, he invents
The Guardian reports: The rise of Peter Navarro – the man put in charge of marshalling emergency US production of medical equipment in the midst of a pandemic – is in many ways a classic story of the Trump era. The 70-year-old White House trade adviser was first recruited by Trump because he wrote a string of books about the Chinese strategic threat – one called Death by China – despite having spent almost no time in the country and…