coronavirus Archives

Tuesday

April 14, 2020

COVID in Colorado

Denver, Colorado is not New York City. There are not thousands of people stacked on top of one another here. To borrow from Arcade Fire, it’s a ‘massive sprawl with mountains beyond mountains’. The population skews toward young professionals in the downtown area and upper middle class families in the immediate suburbs. It’s a city and a state full of recreationalists, participating in a natural social distancing of the mountains in Aspen So how does a city population known for their isolated outdoor activities handle a statewide lockdown order, like the one issued by first-term Gov. Jared Polis on March 25? Colorado faced the grim reality of ranking within the top 15 states for reported cases of COVID-19.

Matt Purple

Lacking liquor in Northern Virginia

It’s been one day since Northern Virginia closed its liquor stores and already civilization has collapsed. Fires burn on the horizon as the cry of the sober mob reverberates through the streets. People nail boards over their windows and spray paint ‘NO VODKA’ on them. Yuppies have descended into the underground Metro stations, where rumor is they’ve become something less than human. Harvesters, we call them, and last night they came for my friend Bone Saw… That, of course, is not what’s happened in Virginia since the state ordered the temporary closing of some liquor stores last week. Life in the quarantined DC suburbs has mostly continued as usual.

Christopher Caldwell

Sovereignty rules

Washington, DC At the end of March, about two weeks into the coronavirus emergency, I looked out my window onto the street below and saw something that made me uneasy about the future of the country. There was a commotion down there. Two white teenagers were standing in the street with their hands up. A man — who looked and sounded like an East African immigrant — had stopped his car in the middle of the road and sprung out. I squinted to see what it was he was holding in front of him that made the kids look so alarmed. It was a pizza. The kids had ordered it. The car was marked with a Domino’s insignia. ‘Whoa, whoa, man!’ said one of the kids. ‘Take it easy!’ He was grotesquely corpulent.

Freddy Gray

Trump should shut down his press conferences, now

What do you do when you are in an argument with an impossible child who sees you as the enemy? Do you shout at them until you sound as unreasonable? Do you keep going back to them to hash out the key points? No, you do not engage. You walk away and leave them to stew in their own rage. All parents know this. Donald Trump is often called childish; petulant; irascible — in his press conferences, he often is. His pride takes him over and he ends up ranting. He takes the bait and the media revels in it. But what the media can’t accept or understand is that, in the president vs media conference dynamic, it is the journalists who play the role of teenage brat. They goad Trump until he flips, then gloat about how mad he went.

Monday

April 13, 2020

Jacob Heilbrunn

Has Fauci become the James Comey of the scientific community?

Is the Trump White House fired up? Not exactly. White House spokesman Hogan Gidley tried to douse the speculation that Anthony S. Fauci is about to be sacked for his incautious remarks on CNN’s State of the Union about the merits of an earlier shutdown: 'This media chatter is ridiculous. Dr Fauci has been and remains a trusted adviser to President Trump.'The problem is that the White House has issued similarly indignant statements in the past, only to watch Trump’s wrath turn pustular on Twitter. Any future transgressions are not likely to be forgiven. For now, Trump, who prevented Fauci from responding to a question about hydroxycholoroquine a week ago at a news conference, has sent a warning shot in Fauci’s direction.

Victor Davis Hanson

The thin facade of authority

The virus will teach us many things, but one lesson has already been relearned by the American people: there are two, quite different, types of wisdom. One, and the most renowned, is a specialization in education that results in titled degrees and presumed authority. That ensuing prestige, in turn, dictates the decisions of most politicians, the media, and public officials — who for the most part share the values and confidence of the credentialed elite. The other wisdom is not, as commonly caricatured, know-nothingism. Indeed, Americans have always believed in self-improvement and the advantages of higher education, a trust that explained broad public 19th-century support for mandatory elementary and secondary schooling and, during the postwar era, the G.I. Bill.

Sunday

April 12, 2020

Roger Kimball

This Easter, we should moderate our complacency

For Christians, Easter commemorates the most important event in history. The importance of the event is not always obvious, for Easter — like Christmas — has been festooned with a garland of secular preoccupations. At Christmas, it’s the gifts and the gaudy, the saccharine and the sentimentality. The kernel of the event, part pagan, part Christian, is often little more that a quiet seed in the cacophony of a holiday from which the 'holy' has been carefully extracted. Still, if you stop moving, you can descry the adumbrations of a ceremony acknowledging the engulfing darkness of the winter solstice and promise of light to come. Easter has been decorated with ribbons and chocolates and strawberries.

Theodore Dalrymple

Didier Raoult — leader of the hydroxychloroquine cult

Professors of medicine do not usually look as if they have emerged from the pages of Asterix, or alternatively as if they were the drummer of a 1960s rock band just emerged from drug rehabilitation for the 17th time: but that is how Prof Didier Raoult, recently elevated to the rank of the most famous infectious disease doctor in the world, looks. If you type 'Didier' in your search engine, up comes Raoult, before even the soccer player, 'Drogba'. When infectious disease doctors are more famous than footballers, you know that an epidemic is serious. Raoult says that he adopted his appearance to irritate his colleagues, which is another specialization of his, one at which he is undoubtedly very good.

Friday

April 10, 2020

Amber Duke

French Hill: Congress should conduct ‘full oversight’ of WHO funding

Rep. French Hill is on board with President Trump's threat to withhold funding from the World Health Organization because of its collusion with China's initial coverup of the seriousness of the novel coronavirus. 'I support the president's indication,' the Arkansas congressman told The Spectator during a Thursday phone interview. 'I think it sends a message to the world that these global, multinational, multilateral organizations tend to be inadequately accountable to those who fund them.' 'I would urge our committees of jurisdiction in the House and Senate to conduct a full oversight on America's contribution to the WHO and what the World Health Organization did or did not do vis-a-vis this particular pandemic crisis,' Hill asserted.

Thursday

April 9, 2020

Meghan Murphy

Actually, it’s not ‘OK’

‘It’s ok’ is a meme that enables lazy millennials across social media to bail on plans last minute in favor of wallowing in self-pity. It seemed to have already completed its meme rounds, having come to its satirical end in January. Now, however, ‘It’s ok’ has experienced a resurgence — thanks to Lord COVID.Social media has been even more drowned in comforting posts than normal. ‘It’s ok’ posts are in overdrive. Would-be influencers insist, ‘It’s ok to eat chips three meals in a row,’ ‘It’s ok to do literally nothing!

Roger Kimball

The case for reopening the country now

More and more people, I suspect, are padding about muttering lines from Psalm 13: 'How long, O Lord,...How long must I take counsel in my soul/ and have sorrow in my heart all the day? How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?' These are good questions. As of April 9, 2020, however, we do not have a reliable answer. You might think that the reason we don’t have an answer to these questions is because we don’t really know the insidious strength of the enemy, the new coronavirus that, with the help of the Chinese back in December and January, has made its way around the world, sickening hundreds of thousands, from Prime Minister Boris Johnson on down. I think that is only part of the answer.

Wednesday

April 8, 2020

Dominic Green

Plagues at Passover

The dust has been expunged and disowned, the bread bin stands forlorn and empty, there is half a ton of matzah in the pantry, yet the Passover of 5780 is different from any other. We are to conduct a festival of liberation under lockdown. The seder, an expansive time for family and friends when the unexpected guest is prized and a cup set out for Elijah, has contracted into the pressure-cooker of the nuclear family or, hardest of all, a solitary vigil, its isolation as likely to be worsened as — excuse the language — leavened by a Zoom session.On Passover, a rabble becomes a people.

Jacob Heilbrunn

Trump’s safari into the wilderness of the deep state

Grin and bear it. Teddy bears are popping up across America in living room windows as families seek to entertain children out for a stroll who are supposed to go on a bear hunt. There’s even a central database, citybearhunt.com, where you can enter your address to assist in the search for the ursine creatures. If Donald Trump wants to project a cuddlier image, he might consider placing one in the Oval Office window.Judging by Trump’s latest moves, though, he is hardly in an emollient mood. Rather, he’s embarked upon his own safari into the wilderness of the deep state. Trump is claiming fresh pelts by the day.

Tuesday

April 7, 2020

Chadwick Moore

Society needed this reset

BrooklynI live on a grim block. Each year another glass-and-steel human filing cabinet, billed by developers as ‘luxury living’ and so sterile you could perform surgery inside, sprouts up to accommodate the millennial hordes charging into neoliberalism’s hippest zip code. These residences have names like The Edge, or The Brooklyn, or The Douchebag. They’re crumbling before anyone has even moved in. The sun-bleached, warped particleboard facades must be constantly replaced. A strong wind hurls Styrofoam paneling, used to resemble concrete or stucco, onto the streets, and rain streaks the aluminum paneling with brown sludge that bakes into a stain.

Will Lloyd

Perplexed by the Fauci fetish? You shouldn’t be

It is a time of airless boredom and mooted catastrophe. A time of robot graduations and Zoom funerals. Statesmen fall ill; serviceable lungs are envied; a sense of being in the wrong place at the wrong time has been globalized. Striding gallantly into the breach, fresh from the hygienic world of Science and Facts, is Dr Anthony Fauci. Lean and owlish, sage and institutionalized, Fauci does not stand to offer a desperate nation much it doesn’t already know — wash your hands everyone. Rather, as the subject of intensifying ribaldry, Dr Fauci may join heroes of a simpler time: Elba, Beckham, Hemsworth, The Rock.Dr Fauci (born 1940) is the subject of a petition to be crowned sexiest man alive for People magazine’s 2020 issue.

Monday

April 6, 2020

Ben Sixsmith

Why we love to hate celebrities

There is a classic Simpsons episode in which young Bart falls down a well. Local celebrities, with the aid of guest star Sting, decide to band together to do something about it. Their magnificently useless contribution is to band together to perform a song in which they ‘send their love down the well’. ‘We can’t get him out, so we’ll do the next best thing, go on TV and sing, sing, sing.’I am surely not the only person who thought of this scene when Gal Gadot, Will Ferrell, Sarah Silverman and others performed a rendition of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’.

Amber Duke

The coronavirus class divide

Tone-deaf media elites and celebrities demand we all just stay home just as they do, self-isolating in their multi-million-dollar LA mansions or NYC brownstones. Journalists who don’t care to educate themselves about rural America — even after wildly misunderstanding the rise of Trump in 2016 — now lecture us country bumpkins, because we’re too stupid to understand how to quarantine ourselves. The architect of this condescending union of the fatuous and the famous was the New York Times.

Christopher Snowdon

Beware the COVID-19 nannies!

COVID-19 has suddenly made much of the western public health establishment effectively redundant. Unused to dealing with infectious disease, we have a legion of epidemiologists who have never studied an epidemic and a horde of public health professionals who are more comfortable discussing soda taxes than virology.If you’ve spent your career believing that drinking, smoking and obesity are the real epidemics, a potentially fatal virus forcing billions of people into hiding could make you question your priorities. But if the nanny state lobby was disoriented at first, it has quickly learnt to adapt. The public are temporarily willing to sacrifice a bit of liberty for safety and the lifestyle regulators sense fresh opportunities.

Dominic Green

What happens if Trump gets the coronavirus?

The White House has announced that everyone coming into range of President Trump will be tested for COVID-19. Trump, meanwhile, insists that he won’t wear a mask when meeting other leaders — or, as he put it in order of reverse dignity, ‘presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens’.Unfortunately the worst-case scenario — that a 73-year-old might catch a dose and get seriously ill — no longer seems outlandish. On Sunday night, Britain’s prime minister Boris Johnson was hospitalized after falling sick 10 days ago. Today he went into critical care. What if someone sneezes and Trump catches a cold?Welcome to the nasty, brutish and short Pence presidency.

Daniel DePetris

The problem is a lot bigger than Trump

It’s incredibly easy to blame President Trump for the coronavirus hell we're all living in. The president doesn’t help himself when he babbles for an hour and a half every single day behind the White House podium, about how smooth the federal government’s disaster management response has been, how superior his leadership. But the truth is much more complicated, troubling, and systemic. America wasn't prepared — and there is plenty of blame to go around. How the hell could the most powerful country in the world be so short-staffed in its hospitals?