coronavirus Archives

Friday

May 8, 2020

Don’t let Karen kill your community

I knew I was dealing with a Karen when the police showed up. We had only recently moved in and we had a serious leak in one of our bathrooms. We called a plumber for emergency repairs. A woman on our block confronted my husband about it and, despite his explanation that the work was essential, she called the cops. Along with all the other problems coronavirus had wrought on our society, we are witnessing the rise of the ‘Karen’. Pre-corona, the term ‘Karen’ was used to describe the neighborhood busybody, the woman in front of you at Target who gets into an argument at the check-out and demands to see the manager. But coronavirus has given Karen a new role in life and more power than she’s ever had before.

Thursday

May 7, 2020

Amy Kalokerinos

Goodbye New York, welcome Gotham

We’ve always known Gotham, the sinister side of New York City, but only in the darkest of shadows and in wonderfully elaborate Batman films. Now Gotham is in plain sight and it’s no Broadway set. Those who chose to stay and those who couldn’t leave are here to witness it’s full emergence. The lucky few have flocked to their Hamptons estates, Hudson Valley hideaways or sunny Florida homes. Everyone can’t wait to get back to their 'normal' busy lives. The problem is 'normal' no longer exists.Gotham is a place of quiet, with lonely streets and 'we are closed' signs on every corner. Some stores have gone so far as to board up their storefronts, a flashback to Hurricane Sandy.

Amber Duke

Doctor rebuts NYT hit piece about Kushner’s coronavirus efforts

The doctor at the center of a New York Times story alleging Jared Kushner bungled the administration's attempts to procure medical supplies is pushing back on the negative tone of the piece, indicating that the Times’s reporting 'did not fully reflect my experience.' Dr Jeffrey Hendricks is quoted in a Times article from May 5 expressing frustration with Kushner's assembled team of coronavirus volunteers, whose job it was to identify potential sources of medical equipment. 'When I offered them viable leads at viable prices from an approved vendor, they kept passing me down the line and made terrible deals instead,' Hendricks said of dealing with the volunteer team, adding that getting responses at all was difficult.

Amber Duke

Get ready for the corona coup

House Democrats, flummoxed by their failed attempt to remove President Trump earlier this year, are gearing up for another round of quasi-impeachment with their coronavirus oversight committee. It's been just a few months, believe it or not, since the House impeached the President for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, but the moment was quickly overshadowed by the global pandemic. The coronavirus committee thus could be the Democrats' last ditch effort to dig up dirt on the President before the election in November.

Wednesday

May 6, 2020

Walter Scheidel

Does COVID-19 mean socialism or social collapse?

Inequality is the price we pay for civilization. Property rights, inheritance customs and unequal gains from technological innovation have long divided us into haves and have-nots. Because stability favors such disparities, it usually took powerful shocks to flatten them. The collapse of states wiped out elites. The World Wars slashed returns on capital and imposed heavy-handed regulation and confiscatory taxation. Communist regimes equalized by force and fiat.The greatest plagues also turned into levelers, by killing so many that labor became dear and land cheap. For a while, the rich became less rich and the poor less poor: Europe after the Black Death is the best-known example.

Matt Mayer

The 2020 question: which candidate will stand up to China?

Imagine you are in your late thirties living in Ohio working at a steel or other manufacturing plant in the late 1990s. You are the second or third generation of your family working at the local plant. Perhaps even your dad is still working at the plant as a union steward. You’ve already seen the impact the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement had on your plant and other parts of Ohio. Under President Bill Clinton, who you voted for and your union heavily backed, China did enough of what the experts and policymakers in Washington wanted it to do to gain entry to the World Trade Organization, which became final in December 2001.

Tuesday

May 5, 2020

Amber Duke

The ambition of Kristi Noem

Gov. Kristi Noem has taken an unconventional approach to the COVID-19 outbreak in South Dakota, avoiding issuing a state-wide shelter-in-place order and instead affording her constituents the freedom to socially distance as appropriate. The strategy has seemingly paid off: with the exception of a large outbreak at a Smithfield meat processing plant, South Dakota has been relatively effective in flattening its curve to prevent overcrowding at hospitals while avoiding shutting down the entire economy. For her ingenuity, Noem has been rewarded with a cynical media that's questioned her motives and desperately tried to prove that her approach is a failure.

Dominic Green

Lockdown is over. Someone tell the government

The coronavirus shutdown is over by public demand. There are crowds of sunbathers in the parks of New York City and mobs on the steps of the statehouses. Pedestrian and road traffic are rising and businesses are defying orders by informally reopening. The people are speaking — the people who used to work on a hand-to-mouth economy, the people who cannot afford to stay indoors indefinitely, the people who cannot be bothered to stay in when the sun comes out.These people are not all the people. They are not the doctors, who counsel caution. They are not the state governors, who are terrified of votes being washed away by a post-reopening second wave of casualties. They are not state employees, who can trust that their jobs will be waiting for them.

Rod Liddle

Corona Derangement Syndrome

Everything to do with this virus is now false news. All the statistics are meaningless: we have no reliable means of calculating the spread and depth of the disease, either from country to country or even within a single country. Pompous dumbos, a vibrant and important tranche of our respective commentariats, insist we must pay no heed to anything but the ‘science’. But nobody knows what the science is. The epidemiologists disagree among themselves. Other branches of the medical profession (those whose interest is in, say, malaria, or cancer), as well as statisticians, are astonished by what they see as an overreaction to an illness which really isn’t quite punching its weight in the Grim Reaper stakes.

Freddy Gray

Land of empty

Coronavirus is so insidious that it is hitting America where it hurts — the stomach. We’ve seen huge lines of cars lining up for food banks since lockdown began, and now a growing number of reports suggest that the nation’s meat supply is breaking down, as outbreaks of COVID-19 affect the largely immigrant workers in pork and beef processing plants. Wendy’s, the fast food chain, is facing complaints from customers who say they can only order chicken — a ‘where’s the beef?’ meme has developed on social media. McDonald’s is putting its meat products on ‘controlled allocation’ to prevent shortages. Tyson Foods, one of the country’s largest meat producers, has said that 'the food supply chain is breaking'.

Friday

May 1, 2020

Michael Tracey

We can’t stop here, this is Biden Country

One of the most eye-popping coronavirus containment measures instituted anywhere in the country can currently be found in the small, oft-neglected state of Delaware. For most Americans, if they’re familiar with it at all, Delaware is experienced only as either a pass-through for travelers on I-95 or as a domestic tax haven referenced obliquely in the text of corporate fine-print. However, there are some hidden charms: quaint little beaches and such. A pandemic would not be the most advisable time to familiarize yourself with these subtle Delawarean glories, though, because you might get pulled over for having an out-of-state license plate. As of March 30, pursuant to an Emergency Order issued by Gov.

Harry J. Kazianis

Dear politicians, life must go on

The worst day of my childhood was in 1995 when my father lost his job. He worked close by as a cook in a local restaurant, just a mile or two from our modest home in Cranston, Rhode Island. I recall what it felt like when he broke the news: I felt my legs start to go under me. I still see him walking up the small hill that led to our home: his head down, his spirit crushed. I still see the look on his face, a man whose purpose had been taken away. My mother cried. We had to sell our house. Nothing would ever be the same. I suspect many American families know what I’m talking about. Nearly 30 million have lost their jobs in just six weeks alone. Millions more will follow.

Thursday

April 30, 2020

Paul Wood

Should we be testing everyone in Britain?

My friend ‘D’ is an instantly recognizable type in the Middle East: the middleman. He’s always chasing the next deal, always about to make millions. One scheme was to build a London Eye in a flyblown town in the Levant. Another was to buy a ‘Trump sex tape’ for $10 million. His latest scheme is to get the British government to buy coronavirus test kits from Turkey. This could be the big score: for biotech companies, testing is a new goldrush. And though there’s a touch of Del Boy about my friend, he’s right about the need for test kits. In fact, to get out of the crisis caused by the coronavirus, we might have to test on an immense, unprecedented, almost unimaginable scale.

Wednesday

April 29, 2020

John Lee

Could the lockdown have side-effects no one has considered?

‘Nothing makes sense in biology, except in the light of evolution,’ the splendidly named biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote in 1973. It’s a good rule of thumb. Despite near-miraculous advances in medical science we remain biological beings, subject to biological laws. None is more central to our understanding of disease than evolution. Yet this theory remains poorly understood and poorly utilized in medicine. And an evolutionary perspective raises important questions about the drastic action we have been taking to confront COVID-19.Most doctors are too busy dealing with the day-to-day deluge of cases to have much time for what they may consider abstruse academic ideas.

Bill Kauffman

What can we learn about coronavirus from classic cinema?

Batavia, New York With the first blizzard of every winter I take John Greenleaf Whittier’s Snow-Bound off the bookshelf, and though I never quite make it through to the end, when the snow is ‘melted in the genial glow’, I feel as if I have hunkered down for the week with the ‘Barefoot Boy’ poet’s besieged shut-ins. So when the Kung Flu — excuse me; I forgot for a moment that mild humor is now as verboten as sweaty raves and square dances — kicked its way into our lives, but before the local library shut down, I, like everyone else — well, like a tiny sliver of the populace — reached for Camus’s...Camus’s...oh, the hell with it: The Plague by Albert Camus.

Tuesday

April 28, 2020

Cockburn

The twilight of Diamond and Silk

Disheartening news from the world of punditry this week, as it emerged that dynamic MAGA duo Diamond and Silk have been cut loose by Fox News. The pair rose to prominence in the lead-up to the 2016 election, with their snappy and boisterous Facebook videos in support of Candidate Trump. That spirit seems to have been their undoing: As CNN put it: 'Over the last few weeks, the duo has advanced all sorts of misinformation and conspiracy theories about the coronavirus. They've questioned the death toll. They've questioned whether the virus is being "deliberately spread." They've suggested the "Deep State" is working "behind the scenes" and that it is "engineered." On and on and on it goes. 'On Wednesday, "Diamond & Silk" posted a tweet.

Zack Christenson

Why are Republicans afraid of vote-by-mail?

Republicans are afraid of voting by mail in November. So is President Trump — which could cost him the 2020 election.The days are ticking by on our way to the general election and our fight with COVID-19 continues to rage. It’s more and more likely that November will see more voting by mail than in any previous election. It’s not a matter of whether Trump wants it or ‘allows’ it: he really doesn’t have much say.Voting by mail has been here for years. All 50 states already have some form of vote-by-mail. Regulations vary, with some states permitting 100 percent vote-by-mail and others demanding proof that you’d be unable to vote in person.

Conrad Black

The changes to come in the post-COVID world order

The Democrats are taking their stand on the coronavirus crisis in an untenable position. It is like building a defensive redoubt in a valley surrounded by hills in the hands of the enemy (like the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1955, as President Eisenhower warned them). Whether this is tactical stupidity by the president’s enemies or strategic genius by the president or — more likely — a bit of both, is not clear except to insiders. Readers will recall that the Democrats charged out of the gate on the issue of taking science seriously and reacting comprehensively; the president picked up the gauntlet, brought prominent scientists forward, and 'flattened the curve'.

Monday

April 27, 2020

Sam Leith

Heads in the cloud

‘Nothing will ever be the same again.’ You hear a lot of that glibly categorical punditry around the COVID-19 outbreak. Already, the progress of a mindless virus through the human population is being touted as the herald of the reorganization of the world’s economic system and the end of neoliberalism, the harbinger of a world in which nurses and shelf-stackers are valued more highly than investment bankers. Well, we’ll see. There are, as has been often said, two great things of which we can always be certain: death and taxes. The former is currently enjoying a bit of a moment. But the latter, sooner or later, is going to make the sort of roaring comeback not seen since First Blood Part II.

Matt Mayer

Are we now in a Fourth Turning Crisis?

Back in 1997, William Strauss and Neil Howe released The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy that articulated a roughly 80-year generational cycle of history based on ‘four turnings’ dating back to the Wars of the Roses starting in 1459, climaxing in 1485. That initial crisis was followed by the Armada Crisis from 1569 to 1588, the Glorious Revolution from 1675 to 1689, the American Revolution from 1773 to 1781, the Civil War from 1860 to 1863, and the Great Depression and World War Two from 1929 to 1944. Fourth Turnings always climax with an existential crisis that either destroys the country or results in its renewal.Based on the 1944 climax, Strauss and Howe predicted the next Fourth Turning would occur sometime around 2005 when a ‘spark will ignite a new mood...