Music: Pat Metheny — ‘From This Place’
System failure: Coronavirus tests in U.S. fewer than 500 a day while other nations test patients by tens of thousands
The New York Times reports: The coronavirus has found a crack in the nation’s public health armor, and it is not one that scientists foresaw: diagnostic testing. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention botched its first attempt to mass produce a diagnostic test kit, a discovery made only after officials had shipped hundreds of kits to state laboratories. A promised replacement took several weeks, and still did not permit state and local laboratories to make final diagnoses. And the…
Reality goes viral: Trump can’t rely on lying and bullying to fight a pandemic
Quinta Jurecic and Benjamin Wittes write: President Trump rode out the Mueller investigation. He survived impeachment. He has waved away dozens of lesser scandals as though they were nothing more than gnats. But now he faces a challenge unlike any he has confronted before: The coronavirus is continuing its spread around the globe and has arrived in the United States, causing widespread alarm and a precipitous drop in the stock market. Americans should all hope he succeeds in mitigating the…
Coronavirus unites a divided China in fear, grief and anger at government
A train attendant in Nanchang, China, gestures in solidarity with medical staff departing for the city of Wuhan, Feb. 13, 2020. STR/AFP via Getty Images By Yuqi Na, Fordham University The coronavirus known as COVID-19 has killed more than 3,000 people and spread into Europe and Latin America, raising fears of a global pandemic. But in China, where the outbreak began, it took just one death to unleash the grief and fury of a nation. On Feb. 7, 34-year-old Dr….
White House and federal agencies offer conflicting advice on the safety of domestic travel
The Daily Beast reports: Vice President Mike Pence said Monday evening that there has been no ban on domestic travel despite the growing number of 2019 novel coronavirus deaths in the United States. But one government agency is effectively directing its employees not to travel, domestically or internationally, at least for the next several weeks. The U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) has banned all temporary duty assignment (TDY) travel as coronavirus cases continue to surge across the globe, according to…
Coronavirus: How behaviour can help control the spread of COVID-19
Commuters jam a Toronto subway platform. Widespread adoption of habits that help prevent infection may boost behavioural herd immunity. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Graeme Roy By Peter Hall, University of Waterloo Amid the carnage of the First World War, a flu epidemic took hold in the front-line trenches and subsequently spread around the world, infecting one-quarter of the world’s total population and ultimately killing more people than the war itself. Before it was over, somewhere between 50 million and 100 million people…
Italy, Europe’s coronavirus laboratory
Beppe Severgnini writes: For a society like Italy, keeping company with others is better than sedatives, and if you have to do without, you suffer withdrawal symptoms. So there may be furious fallout. People have stopped shaking hands, let alone greeting each other with a kiss. If you sneeze or cough in public, people jerk away and show genuine alarm. Conversation is monopolized by coronavirus, and in the absence of clear rules, companies and organizations behave randomly. Why are people…
Lawmakers want DNI to release intelligence on Saudi crown prince’s role in murder of Jamal Khashoggi
The Washington Post reports: Senior lawmakers want the intelligence community to make public what its officials have been willing to say only in classified settings: that Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was responsible for the death of Washington Post contributing columnist and regime critic Jamal Khashoggi. The Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Democratic vice chairman sent a letter Monday to the acting director of national intelligence, Richard Grenell, urging him to reconsider his agency’s…
Music: Pat Metheny — ‘Love May Take Awhile’
Coronavirus will test the resilience of economies that have over-invested in fragile efficiency
Charlie Warzel writes: Constant connectivity defines 21st-century life, and the infrastructure undergirding it all is both digital (the internet and our social media platforms) and physical (the gig economy, e-commerce, global workplaces). Despite a tumultuous first two decades of the century, much of our connected way of life has evaded the stress of a singular global event. The possibility of a global pandemic currently posed by the new coronavirus threatens to change that altogether. Should the virus reach extreme levels…
Brad Parscale used Facebook to get Trump elected in 2016. He’s poised to do it again
Andrew Marantz writes: In September, at a resort hotel in the Coachella Valley, the California Republican Party held its fall convention. Brad Parscale—forty-four, six feet eight, balding, prolifically bearded—walked onstage in shirtsleeves and tilted the microphone upward, mumbling a self-deprecating joke about being “awkwardly tall.” Parscale has lived in a red county in California and a blue county in Texas, and he now splits his time between Washington, D.C., and two luxury properties in South Florida, yet he still speaks…
Trump is winning his war on American institutions
George Packer writes: When Donald Trump came into office, there was a sense that he would be outmatched by the vast government he had just inherited. The new president was impetuous, bottomlessly ignorant, almost chemically inattentive, while the bureaucrats were seasoned, shrewd, protective of themselves and their institutions. They knew where the levers of power lay and how to use them or prevent the president from doing so. Trump’s White House was chaotic and vicious, unlike anything in American history,…
Why Trump made a baseless attack on Supreme Court justices Ginsburg and Sotomayor
George T. Conway III writes: President Trump is treating the judiciary the way he treats the media. But the harm created by these attacks could be far greater. In 2016, CBS “60 Minutes” correspondent Lesley Stahl asked Trump off camera why he persisted in going after journalists. In one of those sporadic moments in which he reveals the raw truth, Trump replied, according to Stahl, “I do it to discredit you all and demean you all, so when you write…
In the face of a pandemic, the rich get or hope for special treatment
Bloomberg reports: One investor may fly to Idaho with or without family. A doctor in a Colorado ski town is soothing wealthy clients who want a cure. And one New Yorker called up the hospital with his name on it. Like everyone across the U.S., the rich are bracing for a deadly coronavirus outbreak. Ken Langone, the co-founder of Home Depot Inc., watched President Donald Trump’s press conference and wondered if the media was overplaying the risk — but he…
Hush money: How Bloomberg silences unhappy employees
The New York Times reports: Every year, hundreds of departing employees at Bloomberg L.P. are presented with a choice: Either leave the company empty-handed or accept a generous financial package and agree to never speak ill of the company. Many take the money. The result is that some employees at Michael R. Bloomberg’s company are barred from publicly describing misconduct and what they perceived as an entrenched culture of bullying, where women are often objectified and sometimes face discrimination, according…
Netanyahu’s war on Israel’s tenuous democracy
Zack Beauchamp reports: On a cool November night in the West Bank, Murad Shteiwi walked me through the streets where he had been shot. Shteiwi is an activist leader in the town of Kufr Qaddum, a quiet village near the northern city of Nablus. Israel closed the road between Kufr Qaddum and Nablus during the second intifada in the 2000s to prevent Palestinians from getting too close to the nearby Israeli settlement Qadumim. A drive to Nablus that should take…