David Frum/Atlantic:
This Is Trump’s Fault
The president is failing, and Americans are paying for his failures.
The United States is on trajectory to suffer more sickness, more dying, and more economic harm from this virus than any other comparably developed country
That the pandemic occurred is not Trump’s fault. The utter unpreparedness of the United States for a pandemic is Trump’s fault. The loss of stockpiled respirators to breakage because the federal government let maintenance contracts lapse in 2018 is Trump’s fault. The failure to store sufficient protective medical gear in the national arsenal is Trump’s fault. That states are bidding against other states for equipment, paying many multiples of the precrisis price for ventilators, is Trump’s fault. Air travelers summoned home and forced to stand for hours in dense airport crowds alongside infected people? That was Trump’s fault too. Ten weeks of insisting that the coronavirus is a harmless flu that would miraculously go away on its own? Trump’s fault again. The refusal of red-state governors to act promptly, the failure to close Florida and Gulf Coast beaches until late March? That fault is more widely shared, but again, responsibility rests with Trump: He could have stopped it, and he did not.
On, Wisconsin:
Jonathan Chait/New York:
Why Trump Is Overruling Scientists to Pursue His Pet Coronavirus Drug
There are eerie echoes of Lysenkoism in President Trump’s obsession with promoting hydroxychloroquine, a medication used to treat malaria, as a cure for the coronavirus. The parallel is not exact: Hydroxychloroquine has shown some anecdotal promise as a coronavirus therapy. It might emerge as a treatment, and conceivably even the major treatment, for the coronavirus. What gives Trump’s hydroxychloroquine obsessions its creepy Lysenkoist tinge is that the fervor is altogether disconnected from science.
Trump has repeatedly touted the medication, at times with a fervency that makes him sound like a marketer hired to promote the drug. “Hydroxychloroquine. Try it. If you like,” he suggested from the podium Saturday. In perhaps the most surreal moment of his pitch, he announced that he might personally try the medication, even though he does not have the coronavirus: “I think people should — if it were me — in fact, I might do it anyway. I may take it. Okay? I may take it. And I’ll have to ask my doctors about that, but I may take it.”
Aaron E Carroll/NY times:
How Will We Know When It’s Time to Reopen the Nation?
Experts offer four benchmarks that can serve as a guide for cities and states, eliminating some of the guesswork.
The first objective of any response anywhere must be to protect lives, and that means averting the collapse of the health care system. Hospitals are the last line of defense. When their capacity to handle emergencies is overwhelmed — as in Bergamo, northern Italy, or in areas of Spain — there is little point theorizing as I am about to: All one can do then is to roll up one’s sleeves, hook up patients to intravenous drips and ventilators, and try to save as many lives as possible with whatever means are available.
But past that point (or, preferably, before it), the ultimate objective must be to bring the epidemic down to a slow burn so as to buy time for the world’s population to acquire, one way or another, immunity to Covid-19.
The Covid-19 pandemic can only be prevented from resurging when at least half the world’s population has become immune to the new virus. And that can happen in only one of two ways: After enough people have been infected and have recovered, or have been inoculated with a vaccine.
James Hamblin/Atlantic:
Why Does the President Keep Pushing a Malaria Drug?
What is actually known about hydroxychloroquine, the medication that Trump is fixated on recommending for COVID-19
Anthony Fauci is not among the impressed. The day the study came out, Fauci, the leading infectious-disease expert advising the White House’s coronavirus task force, downplayed the findings as “anecdotal.” The report was not a randomized clinical trial—one in which many people are followed to see how their health fares, not simply whether a virus is detectable. And Oz’s “100 percent” interpretation involves conspicuous omissions. According to the study itself, three other patients who received hydroxychloroquine were too sick to be tested for the virus by day six (they were intubated in the ICU). Another had a bad reaction to the drug and stopped taking it. Another was not tested because, by day six, he had died
….
In the U.S., Fauci continues to hold the same line as the rest of the medical community—cautious optimism, with a close eye on the many ongoing clinical trials. Trump, meanwhile, escalates as a peddler. “What do you have to lose?” the president said in a press conference on Saturday. “I’ll say it again: What do you have to lose? Take it. I really think they should take it. But it’s their choice. And it’s their doctor’s choice, or the doctors in the hospital.” At a briefing yesterday, he intercepted a question for Fauci about hydroxychloroquine and told the reporter that the doctor wouldn’t be answering it.
Jonathan Weiler/IndyWeek:
How the Coronavirus Pandemic Could Reshape American Politics, for Better or Worse
In turn, many liberals appear to be more convinced than ever that the GOP has become a “death cult,” indifferent at best to mass suffering, as long as it’s “those” people who do the suffering. The specter of deepening antipathy and perhaps complete delegitimization of government when the other party is in power hangs over us.
But there is another view.
One striking fact in the current crisis is that public health messaging is being framed not just in terms of the dangers of the virus to each individual but to people around them. And for now, that messaging is largely working. As of this writing, more than three-quarters of Americans are under stay-at-home orders, in blue and, increasingly, red states. And some really obnoxious exceptions notwithstanding, most are complying.
On a basic personal level, most Americans, regardless of partisanship, now seem to grasp the seriousness of the crisis and their own role in mitigating it.
Stephen Colbert once famously said that reality has a well-known liberal bias. In a similar vein, at some point, all the sophistry in the world cannot explain away what scientific evidence—and reality—make plain. For example, polling in recent years has found that Republicans who live in areas directly affected by hurricanes tend to accept the reality of climate change more than they did previously. Likewise, as Americans see their families and communities affected in the most fundamental ways by the coronavirus, there might be broader acceptance of the relationship between their lives and the role of competent government—and scientific expertise—in protecting it.
Notably, according to some polls, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the infectious diseases expert who has become the go-to medical source on COVID-19, is the most trusted public figure in the country right now.
Matthew Herter/STATNews:
The U.S. gets a D- in the coronavirus fight. That stands for ‘disorganization,’ and it’s fixable
What’s missing is an appreciation of the value of data, and humanity’s mastery of it, as the one weapon we have against an out-of-control virus. The desire to ignore the epidemic and the one to embrace would-be treatments before they’re proven boils down to the same thing: the desire to believe that you can force the world into being fixed without understanding it first. There is no debate that medicines are needed, but we need to make sure we find the right ones.
Another example: the simple face mask, used to prevent infection. Initially, many experts said masks should be reserved for health care workers. On Twitter, Mukherjee has become an evangelist for the idea, now popular, that everyone should wear one. But there’s a problem. Which masks?
“Because there is no central masking authority, as it were, no one knows which ones work and which ones don’t work and which ones are made of what material and who’s decontaminating them,” Mukherjee said. “Because there’s no place to go to find out.”
Whether a mask made from a T-shirt prevents infection is a scientifically testable hypothesis. But we need to conduct the tests. What we’ve been missing throughout this terrible battle is information — data, well-analyzed.
As for Navigator:
And don’t forget to check Civiqs at the top, and the MSN tracker here: