Category: Corona Virus

But there was a voice of caution:

Not to rain on the parade, but P/F is also much more institutionally OK at MIT (all first year classes are P/F, to allow people to acclimate to college). So Im not saying its impossible to do, could be HUGE for the program, but also the institutional view on P/F is very different.

Another Chicago student brought up the problem of students who really did need the grades they expected to earn.

Some students might have low GPAs that theyre looking to increase, which they wouldnt be able to do under a P/F policy something to keep in mind.

A third student interjected that in these extraordinary times, professors might be more flexible than usual:

I strongly suspect it wont be hard to get Profs who just give wall to wall As in the spring ? Probably not in certain departments (we all know who Im talking about), but I genuinely think its likely most Professors are more willing to grade inflate everyone.

Tellingly, there is a precedent for that last students theory.

Patrick Healy, then a reporter with The Boston Globe and now the editor of the politics desk of The New York Times, wrote a story in 2001 recounting how some historians trace grade inflation at Harvard to the War in Vietnam.

Students realized they needed evidence to show they werent just messing around in college to avoid the draft, George Flynn, a historian and author of The Draft, 1940-1973, told Mr. Healy.

The war just set off inflation at Harvard, Henry Rosovsky, who joined the economics faculty in 1965, was quoted as saying. Professors gave higher grades to protect them.

In case you were wondering, N.Y.U. Law announced last Wednesday that it was adopting a Credit/Fail grading policy for all Spring 2020 semester courses. The announcement to students admitted that the policy could come at a cost to incentives and fairness, and urged everyone to try to mitigate those. The announcement read:

Where students are aware that they will receive the same credit for a course almost regardless of their performance, they may not invest significant effort in their work. This is particularly so when a health crisis places other demands on their time and attention. In adopting this shift in grading policy, the Law School faculty are counting on everyone in our community to encourage participation of students who might be disengaged.

The University of Chicago has yet to announce any changes.

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The Human Stories of the Coronavirus Pandemic - The New York Times

For some time this pandemic will focus almost all of our attention. It is a tragedy that will play out differently in different parts of the world; the poor world will suffer more than the rich one. We will see it as a potential turning point, a portent, a sign that we should have cared more and prepared better. However, human progress was slowing before this pandemic began, and our world will continue to slow down for some time to come long after the pandemic has ended. I mean slowing down in almost every way that matters. Because the slowdown was itself slow, we had hardly noticed it. In fact, many people thought that we were still accelerating.

For older generations everything had changed so fast, but in fact that fast pace ended years ago. There is no normal for us to return to; the normality of economic growth is an illusion.

A century ago the pace of change was faster than it had ever been and would become faster again. During the Spanish global flu pandemic of 1918-19, carbon emissions fell by 14%. Industrial production and consumption slowed down dramatically. But then, just a year later when most of the sick had recovered, production and pollution rose by 16% in the year to 1920. Back then we were on the upswing. We were seeing ever faster population growth worldwide; back then a pandemic could not slow us down for long.

In 1918, influenza had a far greater effect on worldwide trends in industry, production and consumption than the first world war which was a war almost entirely confined to Europe. A century ago that worldwide influenza pandemic killed tens of millions of people, no one knows for sure how many. Yet today when we look back at demographic and economic trends, that last great pandemic appears as a small blip with few long-term consequences.

Over the past two centuries, the number of people alive in the world has doubled and doubled and doubled again; from 1 billion shortly before 1820, to 2 billion by 1926 and 4 in 1974; it will be 8 billion in 2023. But crucially the rise is slowing. As I write, our numbers are rising by 80 million people a year. Next year it will be by 79 million, the year after by 78 million. We are still growing in number as a species, but that growth has been slowing for more than half a century already.

We do not yet know what effect the current pandemic will have on worldwide demographics. But it is actually slightly more likely to increase future populations than decrease them. If the actions of governments, or at least of most governments, make people feel more insecure, economically and socially, then younger people may in the near future have more children than they would have had; and the pandemic will, counterintuitively, very slightly increase the total future population.

Security matters. In normal times this point has to be laboured because many readers of newspapers in affluent countries do not realise how precarious the safety net is for most people in the world. But today they are feeling as most people in poorer countries feel most days. Such insecurity played a part in the great acceleration in human population that began more than two centuries ago. It is worth looking back before looking forward.

In 1859 Charles Darwin wrote about the numerous recorded cases of the astonishingly rapid increase of various animals in a state of nature, when circumstances have been favourable to them during two or three following seasons. Darwin used examples ranging from minuscule seedlings to giant elephants; he discussed the very rare cases in nature when exponential population growth occurred in a species. Darwin had no way of knowing it, but he was writing just as his own species was about to have its favourable seasons.

The word slowdown was first used in the 1890s, with its meaning being to go forward more slowly. Our current belief systems economic, political and sociological are all built on assumptions of rapid future technological change and perpetual growth. Yet even since the 1930s, technological change has slowed; the rate of economic growth has slowed every decade after the 1950s; population growth similarly has slowed since before the 1970s; and since at least the 1990s we have started to behave more like our parents again. By the 2010s we (at least in the rich world) were no longer seeing each generation better-off than the one before.

The general slowdown we are living through is advantageous. Recognising this requires us to shift our fundamental view of change, innovation and discovery as unalloyed benefits. We need to stop expecting ceaseless technological revolutions. We need to worry about what mistakes we will make if we carry on assuming that slowdown is unlikely and new great shifts lie just around the corner.

The time has come to properly contemplate what will happen if things stay much the same as they are now, while the rate of change simply slows down.

An era is ending and this was obvious years before the pandemic arrived. The great acceleration that has occurred in recent generations created the culture in which we still live. It created our current expectation for a particular kind of progress. By us I mean the large majority of older people now living on Earth, those who have for the most part seen their health, housing and workplaces improve, those who had seen both absolute and relative poverty recede, but who now have a sense that their childrens generation will not be better off than they themselves are, those who are feeling a sense of let-down due to slowdown.

The alternative to slowdown is unimaginably bad. If we do not slow down, there is no escape from disaster far worse than a pandemic. We would wreck the planet we live on. Slowdown means we need not fear the nightmare scenario of worldwide famine depicted at the end of Paul and Anne Ehrlichs 1968 book The Population Bomb, in which they concluded of India that its people should be allowed to starve: Under the triage system [suggested by them] she [India] should receive no more food. This kind of brutal conclusion was rife in the recent past. Images of out-of-control acceleration became commonplace. That was just half a century ago, at the peak of human population acceleration.

Although now may not be the time to point it out, the frequency and severity of disaster are both falling. The great Chinese famine of 195861 was worse in its effect than any of the earlier terrible huge Indian famines, or the east Africa famine of the 1980s. But the flu pandemic of 40 years before that famine had been worse still in terms of millions of deaths.

Today almost everything is increasing at a slower pace. Prior to the 2020 pandemic, the four great exceptions were: university graduates enrolled worldwide, consumption of goods, carbon pollution and air flights. They have all suddenly slowed due to the pandemic. Before January of this year they all appeared to be rising exponentially and uncontrollably. Today it is even possible that worldwide temperature will not rise in 2020 in the way it rose in 2019, as a reaction to reduced pollution.

Outside brief periods of wartime and pandemic, the global rates of population growth have exceeded 1% every year since 1901. However, according to the latest UN estimates published in June 2019, they will now almost certainly fall below that level by 2023, then quickly drop to below 0.9% annual growth around the year 2027. Everything was slowing down already, everything will still slow down when the current crisis ends. But the slamming on of the brakes on the train we were travelling on might, at the very least, wake us out of our stupor.

Danny Dorling is the author of Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration and Why Its Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives, published 14 April (14.99, Yale).

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Coronavirus is a tragedy but it could be the wake-up call we need - The Guardian

NHS staff are being gagged from speaking out about widespread shortages of personal protective equipment that they fear could risk their lives from the coronavirus, frontline medics claim.

Doctors and nurses are being warned by hospitals and other NHS bodies not to raise their concerns publicly, according to a dossier of evidence collated by the Doctors Association UK (DAUK).

Tactics being used to deter staff from voicing their unease include threatening emails, the possibility of disciplinary action and in two cases being sent home from work. Some doctors have been given a ticking-off after managers were irritated by material they had posted on social media.

Doctors across the frontlines are extremely concerned about the lack of personal protective equipment [PPE]. Many have told us they have tried to raise concerns through the proper channels but have been warned against taking these concerns further, said Dr Samantha Batt Rawden, DAUKs president.

At this time when we desperately need every single doctor on the frontline, some have had their careers threatened, and at least two doctors have been sent home from work. This is unacceptable. Doctors have a moral duty to make their concerns regarding Covid-19 public if these cannot be resolved locally, she added.

The NHS organisations involved appear to want to stop staff from highlighting the lack of facemasks, goggles, visors and gowns that has created huge alarm and fear at the frontline. Many health professionals are worried that they may contract the virus during the course of their work, especially if their PPE is inadequate, and pass it on to patients or their families.

In recent weeks staff have posted photographs on social media platforms such as Twitter and Instagram of makeshift PPE they have put together using materials such as bin bags.

For example, A&E staff at Southend hospital in Essex have been warned that they could face disciplinary action if they raise the issue of PPE publicly.

In a memo on 26 March they were told: The posting of inappropriate social media commentary or the posting of photographs of staff in uniform who are not complying with IPC [infection prevention and control] standards and social distancing requirements is unacceptable. Such behaviour will be considered under the disciplinary policy.

Now, perhaps more than ever, NHS staff are in the public eye and we have a responsibility to convey a professional image and to role model positive messages about social distancing. It would be very sad for moments of inappropriate or unprofessional behaviour to undermine the respect that we and our colleagues have from the public.

Ministers and NHS bosses have organised thousands of deliveries of millions of pieces of PPE to hospitals, GP surgeries and other healthcare settings in England over the last 10 days, often with army drivers bringing it. However, many staff still report ongoing shortages.

In other testimonies given to DAUK:

An intensive care doctor who voiced unease about facemasks was told by their hospital that if we hear of these concerns going outside these four walls your career and your position here will be untenable.

Another intensive care specialist was called into a meeting with their bosses and disciplined after raising concerns.

A GP working at Chase Farm hospital in London was sent home for voicing unease.

A consultant paediatrician in Yorkshire was told in an email from their hospital that their social media output was being monitored and they should be careful.

A GP who appealed to her community on social media for more supplies of PPE was then barred by her local NHS clinical commissioning group from speaking out. I was being warned I wasnt toeing the party line, she said.

Helen O Connor, an organiser with the GMB union, said: Just as it seemed that the widespread and dangerous culture of gagging clauses and suppressing the voices of NHS workers might be coming to an end it is now intensifying.

It is scandalous that hospital staff speaking out publicly face being sacked by ruthless NHS bosses who do not want failings in their leadership to be exposed. Suppression of information is not just a matter of democracy, it is now a major public health issue.

NHS England pointed out that staff were continuing to speak to the media about Covid-19.

An NHS spokesperson said: Once a major incidents occurs it is vital that the public receive fast, authoritative, open, clear and consistent information from their NHS, which is why, in line with longstanding emergency preparedness, resilience and response protocols, official communications are therefore always coordinated nationally.

But staff continue to speak in a personal, trade union or professional body capacity, and it is self-evident from print and broadcast media coverage throughout this incident that staff are able and do in fact speak freely.

The British Medical Association, the main doctors trade union, on Tuesday called on Robert Jenrick, the communities secretary, to clarify what NHS staff who felt they did not have the right PPE for dealing with Covid-19 patients should do, given his comment that we cannot and should not ask healthcare workers to be on the frontline without appropriate protective equipment.

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NHS staff 'gagged' over coronavirus shortages - The Guardian

Samuel Mangera at Kenyatta Universitys Arboretum in Nairobi. One of his messages to the coronavirus: We also cannot afford to pay you too much attention especially with a huge plague of locusts at hand. PTP Studios hide caption

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PTP Studios

I met Sir Lucky Samuel Mangera just days after the Kenyan government had begun shutting down flights and schools and asking people to stay at home. Kenya has reported 31 cases of COVID-19 and over the past two weeks, the government has been rolling out a more and more stringent lockdown, which now includes a curfew.

We met at a bar, past Nairobis industrial area. The bar was completely empty, but on the way there, I saw people paying little mind to the new restrictions: Men, women, children were out on the streets, buying and selling produce; they were boarding crowded buses and without the masks weve gotten so used to seeing on TV in other countries.

I wanted to meet Mangera after I read one of his Facebook posts. It was an open letter to the new coronavirus.

Dear Corona virus,

Welcome to Kenya. A few things you should know. Here we dont die of flu, dont be surprised if you fail to succeed. Usishangae [Dont be surprised], everything fails in Kenya.

The post pointed out the constant struggle of living in Kenya and the many ways Kenyans are let down by the government. It pointed out that when this new epidemic arrived here, there were already many other things Kenyans had to worry about from disease to traffic deaths. It is a sentiment Ive heard from other Kenyans and something I heard often in Democratic Republic of Congo when I was covering the second largest Ebola outbreak in history.

Kenya is not excited to host coronavirus, Mangera wrote. The locusts a historic infestation that experts warn could eat through much of Kenyas food got here first. We also cannot afford to pay you too much attention because we really really broke, he wrote.

I laughed at thatline.

I looked at Mangera sitting on the far side of the table. Hes a college student who writes poetry and makes films. Hes slim and waits for a reaction to his words with a mischievous grin. I tell him while his post is funny, its also really sad.

He nods in agreement. He said thats what he wanted to capture the humor you have to have to live in a place as tough as Kenya.

Honestly, Kenyans are hardcore people, he said. So I wanted to express how Kenyans are survivors in a comic way.

The thing is, out here you dont have to look far to find death. The roads are filled Proboxes, station wagons that zig-zag the country at high speeds, sagging with passengers and cargo. In Japan, the cars were recalled by the manufacturer for being dangerous.

Here in Kenya we survive by Probox, he said, because we dont have an alternative.

Mangeras open letter to coronavirus is full of bravado but also an admission of a deep vulnerability.

We are more likely to die of a cholera attack than to be killed by you. For us, every day is a run escape from death. We are the walking dead. Death is part of our lives the shadow that lingers over us from the time the umbilical cord is cut and buried behind the house to the time we fundraise for expensive arrangements to bury a no longer useful block of dead meat.

As we talked, one other customer walked into the empty bar. He opened a laptop and jumped on the phone. He told the person on the other end that hes worried. Kenyans live hand to mouth. How will they stay home? How will they survive this lockdown?

Mangera admitted that this is the first time he had been out of his house for days. He had a cough and he was terrified he might have CoVid-19. But in his writing, there is no fear.

Death can befall us anytime and we are not scared. It if comes, let it come. Why worry over what we cant control? Everything dies right? Even you corona will die!

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Kenyan Poet Writes Letters To Coronavirus That Are Sad, Funny ... And Hopeful : Goats and Soda - Getaka.co.in

Coronavirus may be spreading, but it isn't necessary to randomly hoard supplies. Here are some basic necessities to have at home in case of an emergency. USA TODAY

SOMERSET, Ky. Josh Sutton saw this coming months ago.

The virus was far awaythen, barely registering in the minds of most Kentuckians. People still ate at restaurants and watched basketball and talked about politics and planned for that first Saturday in May.

That all changed, of course. And Sutton was ready for it.

He already had a years worth of food, tomatoes and beans picked from his garden and canned in mason jars, along with MREs made for combat troops.

He already owned a box of surgical masks and gloves.

Its something you pick up for a few bucks, he said of those now-coveted supplies. You toss it in your garage or attic and you dont think about it, and when times like this happen you think, 'I already have a box.'"

The shredded beef in barbecue sauce MRE, which included seasoned black beats, tortillas and a tropical punch flavored beverage powder.(Photo: Jim Smilie/The Town Talk)

Sutton, 25, is a father, an independent contractor and a self-described "prepper," one of 700-plus members of the private Facebook group Kentucky Preppers Network. "Preppers" believea catastrophic disaster or emergency is likely and prepare for it.

Turns out they were right.

Sutton and others like him in Kentucky and across the country were stocked up on supplies well before people rushed to strip store aisles bare of toilet paper and guns and bread flour, before efforts to slow the virus spread involved limited or shuttered businesses and calls for social distancing.

He and his fellow preppers have been called survivalists, hoarders, conspiracy theorists living in remote bunkers waiting for the world to end.

But this isnt the time to be smug toward those who derided them, Sutton and others said.

Instead, they see this pandemic as their chance to help their neighbors and teach the larger community about ways they can prepare for the next time.

A prepper is like a boy scout, said Dan Brown, founder of the preppers Facebook group and owner of This Old Prepper supply shop in Richmond, Kentucky, about 30 miles south of Lexington. They keep to themselves, help others when they can, receive help if they need it, share and teach skills to each other.

"Kind of like the Amish.

Coronavirus tracker: How many coronavirus cases are in Kentucky? Where are they?

A Texas native, Brown opened his shop in 2013 in a hard-to-find white building near a self-storage business and a bingo hall.

Its a one-man operation, he said, primarily conceived to pass along lessons born from his country upbringing and honed over the years.

It was mostly going to teach people what to do, he said. If I was going to teach something, I needed some sort of product to give examples.

He sells things like water filters, fire-starters and surgical gut suture. He doesnt keep much in stock.

Its not about the money or business. Its more interacting and helping people learn to get by on their own or keep their families fed. Its not an organized thing whatsoever.

The prepping lifestyle, though, has become big business. An estimated 3.7 million Americans are either preppers or survivalists, according to a 2013 article from 24/7 Wall St., and they have fueled a multibillion-dollar industry that has seen unprecedented growth amid the coronavirus outbreak.

Right now, in this environment, everyones a prepper, said Paul Fulton, president of The Ready Store in Lehi, Utah, which sells everything from freeze-dried foods to water storage and emergency gear. Ive never seen anything like this.

Demand for some food items like canned meals or buckets of freeze-dried, dehydrated food has increased by 2,000% since January, Fulton estimated.

The company has met some delays in getting food from processing plants, but there have been no shortages yet.

People wait until its too late, and when its too late, no one can get food quickly enough, Fulton said. Get ready before the disaster happens. Fix your roof while the suns shining.

More on preppers: 8 things preppers recommend to get you through the coronavirus crisis

We answer the often searched question: "What are the symptoms of coronavirus versus the flu?" USA TODAY

While the virus has left prepper supply stores struggling to meet the demand, its also put an uncomfortable spotlight on the prepping community.

Preppers, by and large, are somewhat leery of attention, in part because of how theyve been portrayed as fringe members of society in shows like Doomsday Preppers on the National Geographic Channel. (Preppers interviewed for this story hate that show but acknowledge its not entirely inaccurate either.)

They also dont exactly want to advertise that they are flush with supplies in the middle of a national emergency.

Because they are private folk, they get looked at differently, Brown said. Thats why a lot of people wont tell you theyre a prepper.

Most in the Kentucky group have a similar origin story, Sutton said. They grew up in the country, learned out of necessity how to hunt and fish, to grow and can food, to feed their families if and when work dried up.

The term prepping just put a name to what they were already doing.

We are normal people, he said. Nothing separates us from anyone else, with the exception of we can look ahead.

The prepper group started monitoring COVID-19 news out of China in late December. Most realized it was only a matter of time before it came to America.

It may or may not affect me adversely, Sutton remembered thinking. But at the same time, I have a mom and dad and grandparents. I have to worry about them.

Since its rapid spread, its kind of been like shelter-in-place, he said.

Hes been to the grocery store twice to buy milk and eggs. He hasnt needed much else.

He and his fellow preppers have reached out to family, friends and neighbors to see if they need help or supplies. From a 50-count box of N95 masks he owned, he said he has four left the rest went to elderly neighbors or friends who are first responders or who work in nursing homes.

Prepping," he said, "isnt about being selfish."

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Survivalists and other self-described 'preppers' say they were ready for COVID-19 - USA TODAY

On March 18th, researchers in France circulated a study about the promising experimental use of hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malaria drug, in combination with azithromycin, an antibiotic, as a treatment for the disease caused by the coronavirus. The study was neither randomized nor peer-reviewed, and other scientists soon criticized its methodology. But Tucker Carlson, on Fox News, highlighted the work. The next day, President Trump promoted hydroxychloroquines very, very encouraging early results. He added, mentioning another unproven therapy, I think it could be, based on what I see, it could be a game changer.

At a White House press briefing on March 20th, a reporter asked Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, whether hydroxychloroquine could be effective in treating covid-19. The answer is no, Fauci said, before yielding the microphone to Trump, who countered, May work, may not. I feel good about it. Thats all it is, just a feeling, you know, smart guy. A few days later, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization, said, Using untested drugs without the right evidence could raise false hope and even do more harm than good.

Trumps quackery was at once eccentric and terrifyinga reminder, if one was needed, of his scorn for rigorous science, even amid the worst pandemic to strike the country in a century. Yet his conduct typified his leadership as the crisis has intensified: his dependency on Fox News for ideas and message amplification, his unshakable belief in his own genius, and his understandable concern that his relection may be in danger if he does not soon discover a way to vanquish COVID-19 and reverse its devastation of the economy.

New York City now faces a troubling and astronomical increase in cases, according to Governor Andrew Cuomo, and the emergency is overwhelming hospitals, straining drug and equipment supplies, and threatening to cause a shortage of ventilators. The grim course of events in the city is a canary in the coal mine for the rest of the country, Cuomo said, and leaders elsewhere must take decisive action lest they, too, become inundated. Trump, though, spent much of last week promoting a contrarian gambit that has been percolating in the right-wing media. He said that, to revitalize the economy, he would like to lift travel restrictions and reopen workplaces across the country within weeks, perhaps by Easter, which is on April 12th, because, as he put it repeatedly, we cant let the cure be worse than the problem.

Public-health experts immediately warned against such a reversal of social-distancing rules. The virus will surge, many will fall ill, and there will be more deaths, William Schaffner, a specialist in preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University, told the Times. When a reporter asked the President whether any of the doctors on your team had advised him that a hasty reopening was the right path to pursue, he replied, If it were up to the doctors, they may say, Lets keep it shut down... lets keep it shut for a couple of years. Public-health specialists have said no such thing; they have spoken of a conditions-based approach (You dont make the timeline, the virus makes the timeline, Fauci has said), while advising that, to save the most lives, local leaders must wait to lift restrictions in their areas until the data show that the virus has stopped spreading. Trump said that any loosening of rules he might seek around the countryhe mentioned Nebraska and Idaho as possible siteswould be based on hard facts and data, but he also said that he chose Easter as a target date because he just thought it was a beautiful time.

It is true, as Trump also argued, that enormous job losses and an all but certain recession caused by the pandemic will harm many vulnerable Americans, and claim lives, as ill people without health insurance, for example, forgo care or struggle to get it at stressed clinics and hospitals. Yet, at least in the short term, over-all mortality rates fall during recessions; the reasons for this arent fully clear, but social scientists think they may include the public-health benefits of a decrease in pollution, as a result of the slowing economy. In any event, the case the President made for hurrying an economic revival against the advice of scientists was morally odious; it suggested that large numbers of otherwise avoidable deaths might have to be accepted as the price of job creation.

Public-health officials spoke frankly to the press about the catastrophic prospects of the Presidents Easter folly. (President Trump will have blood on his hands, Keith Martin, the director of the Consortium of Universities for Global Health, told the Times.) Trump responded on Twitter by lashing out at the LameStream Media for reporting such forecasts, calling the press the dominant force in trying to get me to keep our Country closed as long as possible in the hope that it will be detrimental to my election success. Last Wednesday, after Mitt Romney, the only Republican who voted to convict the President, on a charge of abuse of power, during the Senate impeachment trial, announced that he had tested negative for COVID-19, Trump tweeted mockingly, Im so happy I can barely speak. At the White House briefings, surrounded by the sorts of civil servants and experts he habitually disdains, Trump has adapted awkwardly to the role of solemn unifier. When he leaves the podium to tweet nonsense at his perceived enemies, he at least provides his opponents among the countrys homebound, screen-addled, and anxious citizenry with a galvanizing dose of his immutable obnoxiousnessa splash of the old new normal.

The journal Science asked Fauci why he doesnt step in when the President makes false statements in the briefings. I cant jump in front of the microphone and push him down, he said. Americas public-health system is fragmented and market-driven, conditions that only compound the challenge of quashing COVID-19. In the Trump era, however, decentralization has a benefit: the President is not solely in charge, and in the months ahead governors and mayors will continue to shape the odds of life or death for great numbers of Americans. Last week, Trump reviewed the possibilities for quarantine in New York City, his ravaged home town. He rambled about the stock exchange (Its incredible what they can do), before going on to pledge, If we open up, and when we open up... were giving the governors a lot of leeway to decide how this should be done. We can only hope so.

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The Meaning of Donald Trumps Coronavirus Quackery - The New Yorker

Customers at this take-out window in Miami on March 20 were not practicing social distancing. Scott McIntyre/Bloomberg via Getty Images hide caption

Customers at this take-out window in Miami on March 20 were not practicing social distancing.

Within the past few weeks, the COVID-19 pandemic has derailed my plans and expectations for my first year of medical school. It has canceled trips and internships. It has moved classes and social interactions online, dissolving my community as I knew it.

As a healthy, 20-something, I know that if I contract COVID-19, I am less likely to die than older adults like my parents or those with preexisting conditions.

So why should teens and 20-somethings give up hanging out with friends? Why should we let a virus dictate our lives?

That kind of cavalier attitude is present among young people. My newsfeed has been rife with reports of young people at California beaches before widespread beach closures, and at neighborhood brunches and even "coronavirus parties" held in defiance of the guidelines for social distancing.

On a personal level, I know that some of my acquaintances still travel, passing through multiple airports on a pleasure trip. Others host gatherings or attend wine parties in each other's homes with an open invitation to all who can come.

Yet my social media is also filled with powerful calls to stay home and, if you must go out, to physically distance yourself from others.

Even young people with good intentions could be contributing to the spread of the virus. I know of people seeing different friends each day in small gatherings. They may figure there's no harm in an intimate get-together, but this practice is risky. All it takes is one unsuspecting person who's infected for spread to occur. From there, contagion is exponential.

I believe young people can change the course of the pandemic. We can try to forget about the pandemic and live as if we're in the relatively carefree past.

Or we can act as role models, leading the charge in supporting public health measures and act as role models.

Assuredly, everyone has an obligation to physically distance. I think, however, young people have a unique obligation in minimizing the spread of coronavirus.

Some of us are understandably hesitant to accept the challenges of social distancing measures. As a friend suggested, we are trying to salvage our lives during a pandemic that has canceled everything. We've lost our semester of campus life and milestones like graduation. We've given up our spring breaks and have no idea about summer. So we may feel like victims of these unfortunate times.

I do not believe that it is a useful way to view this new reality. Unquestionably, we have all lost something. But we stand to lose something much greater if we do not do our part in mitigating the pandemic.

First of all, our own health is at risk. Even though the danger of COVID-19 may be greater for older generations, many of us are becoming infected. Whether we get sick or remain asymptomatic, we are spreading the virus and contributing to a possible collapse of health-care systems. And some young patients are dying.

We also risk our moral character in how we chose to respond to the pandemic.

In the months I have been in medical school, I have had the privilege of learning about a profession at the front lines of this pandemic and the values and virtues embodied by health workers. Two fundamental virtues benevolence and justice can be embodied by us all.

How can our actions during this pandemic attest to our moral character? Social distancing is benevolent because it will benefit others and prevent avoidable harm. Fulfilling the needs of the elderly and those isolated people who are immunocompromised, undocumented or underinsured is just. And, what underlies these virtues is our shared responsibility in this public health emergency: to put the needs of others before our own.

I'd like to appeal to my peers: If there has ever been a time for altruism, for self-sacrifice, this is it. Our communities and countries need us in overcoming one of the biggest crises of our lives. This is an opportunity for us to rise to the occasion and lead the charge through small ways with a significant impact.

For the goal of flattening the curve preventing deaths and a health-care system collapse from a crush of patients we must physically distance ourselves. We need to limit our in-person contacts and instead log into quarantine apps to connect with friends or loved ones. We should follow public health guidelines because the data show it will reduce deaths and prevent us from getting sick.

If we expect health-care workers to help the sick and be at risk, then we should be prepared to do our part. Beyond just staying home, we can also join efforts to build solidarity from afar. Right now, some of our peers are calling those isolated, donating what they can or fundraising for non-profits that serve as social safety nets. What we do now is critical not only to our country and the lives of others but to our moral character as well.

Amal Cheema is an M.D. candidate at the Geisel School of Medicine, Dartmouth College, class of 2023.

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Opinion: Young People Can Lead the Charge in the War Against Coronavirus : Goats and Soda - NPR

When historiansmarkthe start of this nation's coronavirus nightmare, theywill cite Jan. 21, 2020, the date a Washington state man in his 30s who had visited Wuhan, China, was confirmed as the United States'first COVID-19 case.

Since then, this global crisis has mushroomed into a national defining moment with as yet untallied cultural and economic repercussions. No one questions whether we will be talking about this for generations.If there is debate, it is over the proper historical comparison.

Is this likethe 2008 financial crisis, 9/11, World War II? Or perhaps, as someeconomists predict and news that 3.3 million people applied for unemployment last week suggests,will this be remembered as a periodof deep loss and poverty, something likethe grim 1930swhen unemployment hit 25%.

This will be very economically disruptive and an analogy to the Great Depression is the closest to what we may face, says Stanford University economics professor Matthew Jackson. These huge events can have profound changes on the views and beliefs people have.

That we are in for difficult months and perhaps years ahead seems commonly accepted, as virus deaths mount, hospitals are overwhelmedand a decimated service-based economy spursa $2.2 trillion wartime-scale bailout package in Washington, D.C.

But if there is cause for optimism in these bleak times, historians, economists and writers say, it is born out of the fact that we as a nation can choose to seize this moment to create an even greater society better poised to protect its citizens from future crises.

In this Nov. 24, 1933 file photo, unemployed men wait outside the State Labor Bureau in New York. The epic hardship of the 1930s is the best-known depression in American history, and some economists are concerned the repercussions of the COVID-19 crisis could send the U.S. reeling back to those difficult times.(Photo: AP)

There are precedents for bold responses to watershed American events.

The Depression gave rise to the Social Security Act, which promised citizens financial safety in their later years. World War II drew women into the workforce and minorities into the military, leading to the equal and civil rights movements. And the 2008 financial meltdown gave rise to banking regulations and renewed scrutiny of illicit financial tools.

The possible positive national reactions to the COVID-19 crisis which as of this writinghas infected more than 120,000 Americans and killed more than 2,000, out of a global tally of 680,000 sickened and more than 30,000 dead are myriad.

They could include a renewed appreciation of governments role in grappling with unprecedented crises, a remaking of manufacturing pipelines so they rely less on foreign suppliers,and a rekindled appreciation for friends and neighbors, experts say.

As tough as things look now, I do see us possibly demonstrating a sense that were all in this together, says Joseph Margulies,a law professor at Cornell University in New York and author of What Changed When Everything Changed: 9/11 and the Making of National Identity.

Margulies notes that in contrast to WWII, when Japanese-Americans were rounded up and interned, and the Red Scare, when those suspected ofCommunist leanings wereblacklisted, this debacle has governors from New York to California saying the same thing,'stay home,' and they mean everyone, not one group.

At the moment, most cultural observers note that the sharp political divide that existed before the virus arrived still persists.

Thats evident in everything from the squabbles that erupted as Congress debated the size and scope of the bailout, to the ongoing tension between President Donald Trumps desire to see the nation re-open for business next month and a range of health officials countering that the worst is yet to come if life is allowed to resume prematurely.

A mask-wearing man in the Philippines walks by an iconic poster from WWII America that depicts Rosie the Riveter, a fictional factory worker meant to inspired Americans of both sexes to pitch in to the war effort during the 1940s. Our coronavirus crisis could inspire the same kind of unified national effort at recovering from the epidemic, historians say.(Photo: Aaron Favila, AP)

But some semblance of a unified national direction will be critical to rebounding from this historic moment, given the as yet unknown shifts inthe way we shop, work, travel and learn, says Matthew Continetti, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.

Clearly, the cost of the virus in lives and resources will pale in comparison to the way life may change for us all, he says.Just like terrorism before it, this pandemic may present real challenges to civil liberties that well have to grapple with.

Continetti points out that at the core of the American ethos is freedom, which also can translate into a rejection of government-issued rules meant to ensure public safety. That could create problems if, say, the government were to echo moves by some Asians nations and track virus carriers via their cell phones and closed-circuit TV cameras.

I dont think most Americans are ready to embrace that, he says.

The coronavirus has robbed us all: Let yourself mourn the loss, experts say.

As this COVID-19 emergency eventually turns into a state of persistent vigilance, what could be on the horizon for us is in fact is a difficult push and pull. On the one side, a desire to return to our pre-virus lives at all costs; on the other, an acknowledgement thatnothing will evertruly be the same.

Continetti says what is coming next will represent a true paradigm shift, one in which a society long driven by the pursuit of happiness at all costs may have to rearrange its social and moral priorities.

Its a noble and frightening future were facing, he says. But it may also give us a newfound sense of national solidarity.

Volunteer Art Ponce is handed a box of sterile swabs and gloves from a donor at a Sacramento County collection site in Sacramento, California this week. The state was among the first to declare local and state-wide self-quarantining for residents in an effort to stem the tide of COVID-19 cases.(Photo: Rich Pedroncelli, AP)

A few things should happen rather quickly as a result of this seminal moment in our history, one that undeniably has parallels to the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918, says Rice University historian Douglas Brinkley.

Among them are a renewed appreciation for science, a rekindled admiration for doctors, and a funding bonanza for government health institutions such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a once mighty and now underfunded institution that by most accounts has been caught flat-footed by this pandemic.

In U.S. history, whatever rises to a level of national concern gets funding, and health should rise sky high, says Brinkley, noting that, in contrast, the impact of 9/11 was felt mostly in the northeast and Hurricane Katrina in the Deep South. Coronavirus is touching everyone, so what officials wont want to be prepared for the next outbreak?

Brinkley, who is working on a book about the environmental movement of the 1960s and 70s, is hopeful that another reaction to this historical turning point will be a more urgent focus on curbing climate change.

Many scientists believe that new viruses are bound to spread as global temperature rises lead to the migration of animals. There are suspicions COVID-19 may have jumped species from pangolins, an exotic scale-covered mammal that is illegally hunted in parts of Asia.

You cant wipe out rain forests in Brazil and not expect to have a health care payback,says Brinkley.

When will coronavirus end?What wartime and human kindness can tell us about what happens next

Another sober realization bound to hit Americans across the economic spectrum is how globally interconnected the economies of all nations have become.

That phone youre holding or the car youre driving may be designed or built in the U.S., but countless such products invariably have many parts made in countries whose manufacturing plants are now at risk as employees get sick as governments order shutdowns.

The virus will end, well have a vaccine in 12 to 18 months, but what will the world economy look like after 12 to 18 months of stagnation, let alone if the virus comes back, says Jerald Combs, professor emeritus of history at San Francisco State University and author of The History of American Foreign Policy from 1895.

Combs says that as the virus impacts supplier countries such as India and China, U.S. manufacturing ultimately will have to find new ways to make products or face economic hardships. Such adjustments could be required of American companies for years, given it remains unknown whether the current viral threat is an aberration ora preview of whats to come.

World War II had a huge impact on American society in so many ways, but they had one advantage over what were dealing with, says Combs. They knew at some point the war would end. We, on the other hand, are still not sure.

A tourist wears a mask to help avoid getting coronavirus as she stands next to the statue of former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in Parliament Square in London, where Prime Minister Boris Johnson recently announced he has tested positive for COVID-19.(Photo: Matt Dunham, AP)

To get a sense of just how much this Defining Moment has us concerned, consider that author Erik Larson has received what he calls a surprising amount of messages from readers who have found a sense of solace in the pages of his new book, The Splendid and the Vile, which chronicles how Winston Churchill successfully led British resistance to the relentless Nazi onslaught of 1940.

People must simply be getting lost in a time when you had this catastrophic threat to a nation and a charismatic leader pulling them through it, says Larson. Theres this heroic clarity to that time, Churchill defying Hitler and rallying the public saying were all in this together. I guess maybe people would like that now.

After years of research that brought him close to heart and mind of the legendary British prime minister, Larson is convinced Churchills message today for any nation facing the defining challenge that is the coronavirus threat would be inspirationally simple.

Says Larson: Hed have been quick to say that this is not the apocalypse, all our institutions will survive, our world will endure, and we will go forth when this is over.

Follow USA TODAY national correspondent Marco della Cava: @marcodellacava

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Life may change for us all: How we respond to the coronavirus crisis will reshape US history - USA TODAY

Where did the virus causing the current pandemic come from? How did it get to a food market in Wuhan, China, from where it is thought to have spilled over into humans? The answers to these questions are gradually being pieced together, and the story they tell makes for uncomfortable reading.

Lets start at the beginning. As of 17 March, we know that the Sars-CoV-2 virus (a member of the coronavirus family that causes the respiratory illness Covid-19) is the product of natural evolution. A study of its genetic sequence, conducted by infectious disease expert Kristian G Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, and colleagues, rules out the possibility that it could have been manufactured in a lab or otherwise engineered. Puff go the conspiracy theories.

The next step is a little less certain, but it seems likely that the original animal reservoir for the virus was bats. Andersens team showed like the Chinese before them that the sequence of Sars-CoV-2 is similar to other coronaviruses that infect bats.

Since other bat coronaviruses have transited to humans via an intermediate animal host, it seems likely that this one did too. That animal was probably one that some Chinese people like to eat, and that is therefore sold in wet markets (those that sell fresh meat, fish, seafood and other produce). This animal may have been the scaly mammal called a pangolin. That cant be conclusively proved, but several groups have found sequence similarities between Sars-CoV-2 and other coronaviruses that infect pangolins.

If this is indeed the route the virus took to humans, it has two critical interfaces: one between us and the intermediate host, possibly a pangolin, and one between that host and bats. Most of the attention so far has been focused on the interface between humans and the intermediate host, with fingers of blame being pointed at Chinese wet markets and eating habits, but both interfaces were required for the pandemic to ignite. So where and how did the spillover from the bat to the pangolin or other wild or semi-wild intermediate host occur?

Our study does not directly shed light on the geographical origin of the virus, says Andersen. However, all the available evidence shows that it was inside China.

Case closed then, and President Trump is right to call Sars-CoV-2 the Chinese virus. Well, no, because if you want to understand why this pandemic happened now and not, say, 20 years ago since Chinese peoples taste for what we in the west consider exotic fare is not new you have to include a number of other factors. We can blame the object the virus, the cultural practice but causality extends out into the relationships between people and ecology, says evolutionary biologist Rob Wallace of the Agroecology and Rural Economics Research Corps in St Paul, Minnesota.

Starting in the 1990s, as part of its economic transformation, China ramped up its food production systems to industrial scale. One side effect of this, as anthropologists Lyle Fearnley and Christos Lynteris have documented, was that smallholding farmers were undercut and pushed out of the livestock industry. Searching for a new way to earn a living, some of them turned to farming wild species that had previously been eaten for subsistence only. Wild food was formalised as a sector, and was increasingly branded as a luxury product. But the smallholders werent only pushed out economically. As industrial farming concerns took up more and more land, these small-scale farmers were pushed out geographically too closer to uncultivable zones. Closer to the edge of the forest, that is, where bats and the viruses that infect them lurk. The density and frequency of contacts at that first interface increased, and hence, so did the risk of a spillover.

Its true, in other words, that an expanding human population pushing into previously undisturbed ecosystems has contributed to the increasing number of zoonoses human infections of animal origin in recent decades. That has been documented for Ebola and HIV, for example. But behind that shift has been another, in the way food is produced. Modern models of agribusiness are contributing to the emergence of zoonoses.

Take flu, a disease that is considered to have high pandemic potential, having caused an estimated 15 pandemics in the past 500 years. There is clearly a link between the emergence of highly pathogenic avian influenza viruses and intensified poultry production systems, says spatial epidemiologist Marius Gilbert of the Universit Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium.

The reasons, many of which were documented in Wallaces 2016 book Big Farms Make Big Flu, include the density with which chickens, turkeys or other poultry are packed into factory farms, and the fact that the birds in a given farm tend to be near genetic clones of one another having been selected over decades for desirable traits such as lean meat. If a virus gets introduced into such a flock, it can race through it without meeting any resistance in the form of genetic variants that prevent its spread. Both experimental manipulations and observations in the real world have demonstrated that this process can result in a ratcheting up of the viruss virulence. If it then spills over into humans, we are potentially in trouble.

In a paper published in 2018, Gilberts group reviewed historical conversion events, as they call them when a not-very-pathogenic avian flu strain became much more dangerous, and found that most of them had occurred in commercial poultry systems, and more frequently in wealthy countries. Europe, Australia and the US had generated more of them than China.

That doesnt let China off the hook. Two highly pathogenic forms of avian flu H5N1 and H7N9 have emerged in that country in recent decades. Both infect humans, though not easily (yet). The first human cases of H7N9 were reported in 2013, and there were small annual outbreaks thereafter. But, says Gilbert, nothing was done until the virus turned out to be pathogenic for chickens as well. Then it became an important economic issue and China started to mass-vaccinate its poultry against H7N9, and that ended the transmission to humans.

China is one of the worlds major exporters of poultry, but its poultry industry is not wholly Chinese-owned. After the recession of 2008, for example, New York-based investment bank Goldman Sachs diversified its holdings and moved into Chinese poultry farms. So if China has its share of responsibility for spillover events, it isnt alone. That is why Wallace insists on talking about relational geographies rather than absolute geographies, when it comes to identifying the causes of disease. Or as he puts it: Follow the money.

Not everybody sees a straightforward link between factory farming and new and dangerous forms of flu. Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona, points out that before they were brought into factory farms, poultry were kept outside. The factory model may ramp up virulence, he says, but it probably protects a flock from being infected by a virus in the first place.

Still, Worobey doesnt doubt that farming and other human-animal interactions have shaped our disease ecology. His group collects the sequences of flu viruses from a range of animal hosts, including humans, and plots them on a family treeto try to understand how flu has evolved over time. Flu is constantly mutating thats the reason the seasonal flu vaccine has to be updated each year but it mutates at different rates in different hosts, which means that his flu family tree is informative both about the parentage and intermediate host of each strain and about the approximate timing of past spillover events.

Its possible though by no means certain that flu first became a disease of humans after the Chinese domesticated ducks about 4,000 years ago drawing that animal reservoir into human communities for the first time. But humans can also catch flu from, and give flu to, pigs another animal we have lived alongside for millennia. A few years ago, Worobey suggested controversially that birds might not always have been the main intermediate host for human flu viruses. Until about a century ago, he reported, people may have caught flu from horses. Around the time that motor vehicles supplanted horses as transport, poultry farming was expanding in the western hemisphere, and its possible, Worobey argued, that birds then took over as the main intermediate host of flu for humans.

Not everyone buys that scenario. Wendy Barclay, a virologist at Imperial College London, says that if horses were once the main intermediate host for flu, most avian viruses would contain the mammalian adaptation, and they dont. David Morens of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland, thinks that it is more likely that the horse was a temporary detour, and that the main intermediate host of flu for humans has always been birds especially wild ones. But all agree that humans have shaped these host-pathogen relationships, through our use of land and other animal species. And as Worobey points out, the sheer size of the human population today means that in the 21st century, we are doing so on an unprecedented scale. He estimates, for example, that domesticated ducks probably outnumber wild ones by now.

And were not just talking about birds. Gilbert believes a ratcheting up of viral virulence is happening in pig herds, too. Porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS), a disease of pigs that was first described in the US in the late 1980s, has since spread to herds across the worldand strains detected recently in China are more virulent than the early American ones. A 2015 study carried out by Martha Nelson of the US National Institutes of Health and colleagues mapped the genetic sequences of swine flu viruses and found that Europe and the US the largest global exporters of pigs are also the largest exporters of swine flu.

There have been claims on social media, sometimes posted by vegans, that if we ate less meat there would have been no Covid-19. Interestingly, some of these have been blocked by mainstream news organisations as partly false. But the claims are also partly true. Though the links they draw are too simplistic, the evidence is now strong that the way meat is produced and not just in China contributed to Covid-19.

It is clear that to prevent or at least slow the emergence of new zoonoses, as Fearnley and Lynteris have argued, Chinas wet markets will need to be better regulated. But we also need to look behind those markets, at how our food is produced globally.

Though it may not feel like it now, Wallace says, we have been lucky with Sars-CoV-2. It appears to be far less lethal that either H7N9 which kills around a third of those it infects or H5N1, which kills even more. This gives us an opportunity, he says, to question our lifestyle choices because chicken isnt cheap if it costs a million lives and vote for politicians who hold agribusiness to higher standards of ecological, social and epidemiological sustainability. Hopefully, he says, this will change our notions about agricultural production, land use and conservation.

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China's national liquor offered bottles of their premium product as a reward to health-care workers who traveled to Wuhan to help fight coronavirus. But there was a catch. Zhang Peng/LightRocket via Getty Images hide caption

China's national liquor offered bottles of their premium product as a reward to health-care workers who traveled to Wuhan to help fight coronavirus. But there was a catch.

Pan-fried buns with beef filling, shrimp stir-fried with seasonal bamboo shoots, roasted chicken and seared scallops such dishes are on the menu for the Shanghai medical staff who recently returned from Wuhan in Hubei province, the epicenter of China's COVID-19 outbreak. To show its gratitude for the 1,649 now-quarantined workers, the city has cooked up a free 14-day meal plan for them.

In Hangzhou city in Zhejiang province, the city's Federation of Trade Unions is saying "thank you" by handing out 2,000 yuan ($280) cash to the families of 122 medics, who will also get paid leave to recuperate after "winning the battle of epidemic prevention and control."

Meanwhile, in Guizhou province, residents are wondering: Is a reward still a reward if the heroes have to pay for it?

In the poverty-stricken province, Guizhou Liquor Exchange, a trading platform that promotes liquor trading, investment and storage, took the appreciation game in a questionable direction. It recently offered each of the 1,443 front-line medical workers back from Hubei the opportunity to buy up to six bottles of the nation's most sought-after liquor a locally produced, 106 proof Maotai liquor called Feitian at 1,499 yuan ($210) per bottle.

A bottle of Feitian could fetch from 2,000 yuan ($280) to 300,000 yuan ($42,200), depending on the year it was made and market demand.

Produced by the state-owned Kweichow Moutai Group in Guizhou, Maotai liquor is the Chinese answer to premium scotch. Known as China's national liquor, it's often served on official occasions and holiday dinner tables. In 1972, Chinese premier Zhou Enlai made a Maotai toast to then-President Richard Nixon, who was warned prior to the banquet not to drink it. (He did anyway.)

Although the Group sold 142,000 tons of liquor worth more than 100 billion yuan ($14 billion) in 2019, it's not enough for those thirsty for Maotai. Fake Maotai liquors are all over the market, retailing at similar price points. Some fans make pilgrimages to Maotai town, where each visitor is allowed to buy two bottles. On the Chinese e-commerce site Tmall, Feitian liquor is available each day, with a limit of two bottles per 180 days. It's snapped up in seconds.

While $2,106 for six might be a steal, consider the per capita disposable income of an urban resident in Guizhou: 20,397 yuan ($2,870) in 2019. That's one reason the offer has been derided as a crass publicity stunt.

"They [Guizhou Liquor Exchange] are shameless," said a commenter on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter. "It's just a couple bottles of liquor. Can't they just give for free?"

"This is how you treat our heroes?" another opined.

"Do you think regular medical workers can afford it?" one asked.

Others think it's a good deal, especially given the resale market.

"Do you not know how expensive Maotai liquor is? Isn't this a reward?" one netizen asked.

"I think it's pretty good," another said. "They can make money by reselling these liquors."

As criticism became increasingly heated, the Guizhou government stepped in, asking Guizhou Liquor Exchange to immediately stop using the pandemic for marketing purposes.

The Exchange has not yet commented.

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Coronavirus Heroes In China Get 'Thank You' Liquor But It's Not Free : Goats and Soda - NPR