Health

Monday

Ross Clark

We’re all Chinese now

I didn’t know this was what they meant by ‘cancel culture’. Sports events, theatre shows, plane flights, weddings, funerals: everyone is in a mad rush to cancel everything. Governments are ordering citizens to remain indoors, with Spanish police even deploying drones to catch miscreants. I don’t know whether it is the best way of tackling coronavirus — the UK government, which has gone to greater lengths than others to explain the scientific modeling behind its decision-making, has come to the conclusion that banning things and forcing the entire population into lockdown will have minimal effect and may even be counter-productive, at least at this stage. But it is going to cause a global recession, if not depression.

chinese

Friday

Amber Duke

What have we learned since the swine flu outbreak?

Donald Trump declared a national emergency on Friday over the spread of COVID-19, promising to dedicate $50 billion in funding for states to fight the virus. The order is the latest in a line of actions taken by the administration to try to stem the spread of the virus: major restrictions on travel from China and the European Union, convincing insurance companies to waive copayments on Coronavirus testing, and loosening FDA restrictions on testing, among others. 'We will overcome the threat of the virus,' President Trump said during a news conference in the White House Rose Garden.

Barack Obama swine flu

Thursday

Melissa Chen

How do pandemics change the way we think?

It starts with seemingly insignificant numbers alongside little red blips on the world map. In a matter of days, the numbers soar and the red circles balloon to engulf an entire region. This pattern has repeated itself several times across the globe — notably in South Korea, Iran and Italy — as the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 has surged since the virus first emerged in Wuhan back in December. Despite the Chinese economy coming to a grinding halt amid an unprecedented city-wide lockdown, the inevitable happened. The virus could not be contained within mainland China’s borders, and neither could its accompanying fear.Coronavirus has spread perniciously, causing 4,716 deaths worldwide and radically transforming life as we know it.

pandemics

Wednesday

Dominic Green

Trump cannot defeat a virus

There are no atheists in foxholes, and no libertarians in a pandemic. As the spread of the COVID-19 virus in the United States starts to resemble the exponential outbreaks in countries where the pandemic is more advanced, the American public wants the kind of security that only government can provide. Donald Trump was elected to provide security, whether from the domestic challenge of outsourcing or the foreign challenge of a rising China. In recent days, he has failed in judgment, in leadership and in decision-making. Only after the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic did he address the nation and announce the closure of America’s borders.

trump

Monday

Jacob Heilbrunn

Trump’s lack of coronavirus concern is concerning

President Trump was asked about the coronavirus on Saturday. He responded, 'No, I'm not concerned at all. No, I'm not.' His lack of concern is becoming concerning.The stock market is tanking. The energy sector is cratering. The global economy looks like it could be headed for a recession, And China claims that it’s on the road to licking the virus.For Trump the political implications could end up being dire. The surge that Joe Biden is enjoying would be almost unthinkable absent the coronavirus. Biden will likely stomp all over Bernie Sanders in Michigan and elsewhere. There will be no contested Democratic convention. Instead, the party is unifying as rapidly as it can behind him.And Trump? As is his wont, he’s acting like this is another hoax, a crisis that’s no biggie.

donald trump coronavirus concern

Friday

Roger Kimball

Donald Trump vs corona hysteria

I like to keep a couple of books within easy reach of my desk to remind myself what sort of creature I am dealing with. As I often write about academics and academic administrators, one of these is Ralph Buchsbaum’s Animals Without Backbones: An Introduction to the Invertebrates, whose title perfectly captures the mushy, moist, moral manner of those matchless, modern martinets. Since I also often write about what Lionel Trilling called the ‘bloody crossroads’, where politics and culture meet, the other book within easy reach is Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.  The chief instigator of madness these days is Donald Trump. He is like that old-fashioned confection called Fizzies.

President Trump Holds Press Conference With CDC Officials On Coronavirus

Tuesday

Alex Colville

In coronavirus quarantine

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. I’ve been quarantined, like millions of others in China. It was bound to happen sooner or later. I traveled all the way from Beijing to the third-tier city of Jining in Shandong province, where anyone arriving from another region must be detained for 14 days. There’s no kind way to deliver the news, so a Chinese colleague broke it to me over WeChat in a gentle but firm tone. It felt like being fired or dumped. It could be worse. I’m free to leave my building, but not the walled housing compound surrounding it.

coronavirus

Monday

Matt McDonald

Being mistaken for James Corden motivated my weight loss

Late night host James Corden had a viral moment over the weekend when he clapped back at Bill Maher for his comments about fatness. 'If making fun of fat people made them lose weight, there’d be no fat kids in schools,’ Corden said. 'And I’d have a six-pack right now.’ Well James, I’m here to tell you you're wrong. Fat-shaming can work. And I know. Because I was once mistaken for you. I was leaving an extremely busy pool hall in Manhattan's West Village with some friends one Saturday in early December last year. It was the kind of place where you had to collect a ticket from the bar in order to wait your turn for a table — and we had been waiting for over an hour.

james corden

Tuesday

Christopher Snowdon

Dispersing the clouds of the vape panic myth

The Great American Vaping Panic is reaching its ghastly conclusion. As I write this, five people have died in hospital and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is investigating 450 reports of people going into seizures after vaping. Politicians are demanding a renewed clampdown on an e-cigarette industry that was being blamed for a youth ‘tobacco epidemic’ long before these events unfurled. The market leader, Juul, is under investigation by the FDA, its products are banned in the company’s hometown of San Francisco and it may not be long before they are banned nationwide. Moral panics rarely come out of nowhere and there is a grain of truth in this one. Dozens of people, mainly young men, have been hospitalized after vaping in recent weeks.

vape

Monday

Daniella Greenbaum Davis

Lizzo and the politically incorrect obesity epidemic

The woke have spoken: fat is fab. This is great news for Lizzo, an American singer and rapper whose rise to fame and celebrity has been rapid and shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon. Lizzo, or Melissa Jefferson as she was once known, is unquestionably rotund. In the days of yore, Lizzo’s excessive layers would have been considered optimal, a marker of wealth and status coveted by women and adored by men. In theory, we’ve grown and evolved since those days, and now enjoy unprecedented levels of knowledge and education about medicine, diet, and exercise. This wealth of information should produce an especially healthy populace; instead, Americans continue to stuff ourselves with everything we know we shouldn’t eat: too much red meat, too much fried food, too many carbs.

lizzo

Wednesday

Libby Emmons

Humanity + wants us to live forever

We are constantly pushing toward the apocalypse. Whether it's Judgment Day, suicidal death cults, or freaking out about how we only have five minutes to reverse climate change, the End of Days looms large in our imaginations. Relatively new to the End Times game are the transhumanists, who hope to defer the end for all time. Transhumanists believe that we can integrate humanity with tech to extend life, or even live forever.Transhumanists want us to evolve into a tech-integrated species. This would allow us to extend human life through deferring and even annulling the physical decay that ends in death. Organ replacement, micro repairs with nanotech, and AI integration would decrease likelihood of death by natural causes.

transhumanism humanity +

Saturday

Tanya Gold

I’d rather be fat-shamed than have cancer

Sofie Hagen is a young Danish comic I admire. I didn’t see her most recent show, Dead Baby Frog, but I saw her win the best newcomer award at Edinburgh in 2015 and I was happy for her. I liked her sweet face and her fury. The audience treated her as a benign oddity. Because Sofie is fat. I say this with no judgment, for I am fat myself, but I am not as upset about it as she is. I make no attempt to spin my fat into a matter for universal sympathy and something to be admired. It is, as the adult self says, what it is. Even so, I used to write about being fat so often that other columnists told me to stop it, for fear I was monetising self-hatred. To which I say — what else are you supposed to do with it?