Quarantine

Monday

Michael Tracey

Trump isn’t the only one to blame for our slack response to COVID-19

From our US edition

One of the mantras for interpreting the nature of Donald Trump has always been to take him ‘seriously, but not literally’. When this maxim was first introduced in September 2016, the advice was clearly useful. Journalists and pundits were in a constant state of outrage over his every utterance. The daily deluge of Trump jokes, wisecracks, obviously figurative exaggerations, and ALL CAPS tweets were incessantly ‘fact-checked’ in the most tedious fashion by members of the media who hated Trump. One illustrative example would be when Trump accused Barack Obama of being the ‘founder’ of Isis. In short order, the fact-checking brigades sprung into action to clarify that Obama had not in fact literally founded Isis.

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Saturday

Rory Sutherland

Will quarantine for travellers become normal again?

It wasn’t a coincidence that the US government chose Ellis Island as an immigration station. The crucial word is ‘island’. Had the RMS Titanic missed that fateful iceberg in 1912, she would eventually have taken up station at a quarantine area at the entrance to the Lower Bay of New York Harbor, to await medical inspectors who would board the ship from a cutter. The quarantine exam would have been performed aboard, but only for first- or second-class passengers (US citizens were exempt). These would have been inspected for cholera, plague, smallpox, typhoid fever, yellow fever, scarlet fever, measles and diphtheria. A few might have been marked to be sent to Ellis Island for further examination.

Friday

Cockburn

The Spectator’s guide to video conference etiquette

From our US edition

Video conferences are like all business meetings — 95 percent pointless and usually arranged and dominated by some self-important twerp. Still, humans attach strange importance to management habits and, now that we are living in the age of the coronavirus, many of us will have to do a lot more video conferences for work. Ever the public servant, Cockburn has compiled the following guide to video conference etiquette. 1) Dress Cockburn prefers formal attire, yet in times of isolation, the rules can be relaxed. Nudity is too much, no matter how matter impressive one's physique. Pajamas are a no-no, too. Sporting a kaftan on the call may make you feel like a charismatic tech billionaire dialing in from Mustique. But everybody knows you aren’t — so put a shirt on.

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donald trump recovery
Daniel McCarthy

After the coronavirus, who wins the recovery?

From our US edition

We are living through a gruesome case study in the irrationality of elites. COVID-19 is a serious disease, but the question of just how serious it is has hardly even been posed correctly, let alone answered intelligently. Yet already our leaders have assumed dictatorial airs and enacted policies that threaten to plunge the Western world into an economic crisis unmatched since the Great Depression. Eighty days into 2020, the official worldwide death toll from the coronavirus stands at somewhat over 10,000 lives. That includes fatalities from the final months of 2019 as well, when Chinese authorities initially tried to disguise rather than treat the outbreak of the new disease. The world was utterly unprepared for the virus as it spread from Wuhan.

Thursday

Chadwick Moore

Americans love living in a disaster movie

From our US edition

In America, we don’t have snow showers anymore. Those meteorological events are now known as Snowmageddons, Snowpocalypses, or Polar Vortices. We’ve even begun to name them, like hurricanes. Each season, as newscasters brace for the arrival of Winter Storm Mephistopheles, inching along the map with its Judgment Day payload of fluffy white powder, most Americans see through the hype, but we’ll ransack grocery store shelves anyway. After all, it might be weeks before another thrill like this comes along. When something truly unnerving arrives, like a global pandemic, America serves up just the right pitch of high-octane, Hollywood disaster-flick pandemonium to make the whole thing a bit zanier and more camp. The world depends on us for that. We invented the genre.

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Wednesday

The Spectator

The lockdown list: books to read during quarantine

From our US edition

Now we’ve got time on our freshly cleaned hands, The Spectator’s literary luminaries are lubricating the wheels on time’s wingèd chariot and seizing the chance to boost their morale and brain function, reflect on the meaning of life and catch up on a good book or six. Each day, the Lockdown List carries our bibliophilic recommendations. Day 74: Indian summerRoss Clark The success of Black Lives Matter has deflected attention from a group which has no less a cause for grievance over its treatment throughout US history: native Americans. Indeed, to this day Native Americans, thousand for thousand, have an even greater chance of being killed by police officers as do African Americans.

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