Flu pandemic

Monday

Kat Rosenfield

The zero COVID delusion

During World War Two, ordinary citizens were encouraged to plant victory gardens, collect scrap metal and carpool to save fuel, always with the understanding that these measures would somehow contribute to victory. The propaganda of the time was heavy on the same ‘do your part’ messaging that we've seen during the COVID pandemic, giving meaning to people's sacrifices by characterizing their efforts as a patriotic duty and a moral imperative — and by strongly implying that those who balked at those sacrifices were on the side of the bad guy. One of the most famous posters from the era shows a snappily-dressed man behind the wheel of a car, with a ghostly, familiar figure sporting a toothbrush mustache in the passenger seat.

covid

Tuesday

Ed Zotti

The city that never dies

Peggy Noonan, in a recent Wall Street Journal column, offers a bleak take on the pandemic’s impact on American society, or at any rate the subset that lives in New York. New York vies with London as one of the most prodigious aggregations of talent on the planet, and has survived a previous pandemic, multiple financial crises and a terrorist assault. Noonan’s argument — and she’s far from the only one to make it — is that NYC is headed over a cliff because corporate managers have awakened to the advantages of the Zoom call. I can understand how such dark notions arise. Given the breadth and scale of the present catastrophe, it’s not unreasonable to think the world has changed irreversibly for the worse. But I don’t think it has, at least not due to coronavirus.

new york

Wednesday

Niall Ferguson

Who will win the corona wars?

The COVID-19 pandemic came along just as Cold War Two was getting under way between the United States and the People’s Republic of China — the superpowers of our time — with the European Union and a good many other US allies quietly hoping to be non-aligned. Far from propelling Beijing and Washington towards détente in the face of a common enemy, the new plague has only intensified the Cold War. For the first time, China’s campaign of disinformation has been on a Russian level, with wild anti-American conspiracy theories being disseminated by senior Foreign Ministry officials.

corona wars