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Fauci also spoke about a new, more contagious variant of the coronavirus that has been detected in dozens of countries, including the U.S. "It does not appear to be more virulent, namely making people sicker or greater incidence of dying," Fauci told NBC's Chuck Todd. "Nor does it seem to elude the protection that's offered by the antibodies that are induced by the vaccine."

Many people are holding out hope that the COVID-19 vaccines will help quell the pandemic.

More than 4.2 million people have received the initial vaccination dose as of Saturday, according to the CDC. That number is far below the government's goal of having 20 million people in the U.S. vaccinated by the end of December.

"I want people to understand that the projections we were putting out were based on what we could control at the federal level. And we did deliver on 20 million doses delivered, but you're always going to have more doses allocated versus delivered. Delivered versus shots in arms," Adams said.

That approach has led to jammed phone lines, websites crashing and in some cases, people camping out in counties that took a first-come, first-served approach. In terms of what happens next with the booster shot, Zaragovia says Florida residents will have to wait for more information

While vaccinations continue, public health officials say it's still important to continue social distancing practices, including wearing masks, washing hands and watching how close people get to others.

President-elect Joe Biden opposes the death penalty and has said he will work to end its use, but as President Trump's administration accelerates the pace of federal executions in the closing days of his presidency, activists and progressive lawmakers are feeling more urgency to push Biden to act immediately upon taking office.

"Ending the barbaric and inhumane practice of government-sanctioned murder is a commonsense step that you can and must take to save lives," the lawmakers write. "We respectfully urge you to sign an executive order on Day 1 to place an immediate moratorium on the country's cruel use of the death penalty and signal your commitment to dismantle its use altogether."

The lawmakers are calling on Biden to "end the federal death penalty" on his first day in office. That's something that he wouldn't be able to do alone. "A U.S. president does not have the power to abolish the federal death penalty," Dunham said. "The only way that the federal death penalty can be abolished is an act of Congress signed by a president, or from a court decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. It's clear from the current composition of the Supreme Court that that's not going to happen, so the only way that the Biden administration would be able to end the federal death penalty would be to have some sort of bipartisan support in Congress."

Likewise with the five largest countries in Latin America, where only Argentina stands out as a clear success, while Brazil and Peru have worse death rates than ours, Mexico is just below us and Colombia a little further down.

Having lived through the last six months, I am sure some lives would have been saved if Trump had encouraged his own voters to take Covid-19 seriously at the outset, or if he had prodded his bureaucracy during the lost month of February, or if he had discouraged early reopening in the Sun Belt, and so on. If those failures add up to 20,000 lives lost instead of 145,000 it’s still a tragic record of avoidable mass suffering.

the same is true if you look at overall excess death statistics (the number of deaths above normal levels), which fewer countries keep, but which are probably a more accurate measure than a Covid-19-specific count. Again, Germany looks great, but Britain, Spain and Italy all have worse numbers than the United States.

Overall, once you observe the general pattern where the Western Hemisphere and Western Europe have been particularly hard hit, it’s hard to distinguish the big countries run by centrists or socialists from the country run by Donald Trump

the peer-country evidence suggests that to take the pre-emptive, creative and draconian steps that might have actually suppressed the virus, and in the process saved that hundred thousand or more extra lives, would have probably required presidential greatness, not merely replacement-level competence.

distinguishing between Trump’s incompetence and what an average president might have managed is harder, so long as so many peer-country death tolls look like ours.

The authors applied the same analysis to two other towns and in both came up with anomalous deaths 6.1 times the number officially attributed to COVID-19

The authors go on to speculate or argue that the answer is something like universal infection from COVID-19. They note that if all citizens of the town had been infected, 158 deaths would equal to 1% mortality, which is close to the ballpark estimate most epidemiologist are working with. (11,500 residents and 123 fatalities, when you subtract the average of 35 deaths from the recorded number of 158.)

it also seems possible to me that some significant part of this is people dying from other ailments they might have survived because of the degraded standard of care amidst a pandemic.

The authors quite reasonably speculate that most of this additional fatalities are “largely elderly or frail people who died at home or in residential facilities, without being hospitalized and without being swabbed to verify that they have actually become infected with Covid-19.” Italy does have a relatively large elderly population.

What seems clear is that death toll tied to the COVID-19 epidemic – whether clinically caused by or caused by the larger epidemic – is dramatically higher than the official numbers.

The numbers as described really don’t leave a lot of room for interpretation

They worried that a vaccine would initially elude scientists, that weary citizens would abandon restrictions despite the risks, that the virus would be with us from now on.

Most experts believed that once the crisis was over, the nation and its economy would revive quickly. But there would be no escaping a period of intense pain.

Exactly how the pandemic will end depends in part on medical advances still to come. It will also depend on how individual Americans behave in the interim. If we scrupulously protect ourselves and our loved ones, more of us will live. If we underestimate the virus, it will find us.

More Americans may die than the White House admits.

The epidemiological model often cited by the White House, which was produced by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, originally predicted 100,000 to 240,000 deaths by midsummer. Now that figure is 60,000.

The institute’s projection runs through Aug. 4, describing only the first wave of this epidemic. Without a vaccine, the virus is expected to circulate for years, and the death tally will rise over time.

Fatality rates depend heavily on how overwhelmed hospitals get and what percentage of cases are tested. China’s estimated death rate was 17 percent in the first week of January, when Wuhan was in chaos, according to a Center for Evidence-Based Medicine report, but only 0.7 percent by late February.

Various experts consulted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in March predicted that the virus eventually could reach 48 percent to 65 percent of all Americans, with a fatality rate just under 1 percent, and would kill up to 1.7 million of them if nothing were done to stop the spread.

A model by researchers at Imperial College London cited by the president on March 30 predicted 2.2 million deaths in the United States by September under the same circumstances.

China has officially reported about 83,000 cases and 4,632 deaths, which is a fatality rate of over 5 percent. The Trump administration has questioned the figures but has not produced more accurate ones.

The tighter the restrictions, experts say, the fewer the deaths and the longer the periods between lockdowns. Most models assume states will eventually do widespread temperature checks, rapid testing and contact tracing, as is routine in Asia.

In this country, hospitals in several cities, including New York, came to the brink of chaos.

Only when tens of thousands of antibody tests are done will we know how many silent carriers there may be in the United States. The C.D.C. has suggested it might be 25 percent of those who test positive. Researchers in Iceland said it might be double that.

China is also revising its own estimates. In February, a major study concluded that only 1 percent of cases in Wuhan were asymptomatic. New research says perhaps 60 percent were.

The virus may also be mutating to cause fewer symptoms. In the movies, viruses become more deadly. In reality, they usually become less so, because asymptomatic strains reach more hosts. Even the 1918 Spanish flu virus eventually faded into the seasonal H1N1 flu.

The lockdowns will end, but haltingly.

it is likely a safe bet that at least 300 million of us are still vulnerable.

Until a vaccine or another protective measure emerges, there is no scenario, epidemiologists agreed, in which it is safe for that many people to suddenly come out of hiding. If Americans pour back out in force, all will appear quiet for perhaps three weeks.

The gains to date were achieved only by shutting down the country, a situation that cannot continue indefinitely. The White House’s “phased” plan for reopening will surely raise the death toll no matter how carefully it is executed.

Every epidemiological model envisions something like the dance

On the models, the curves of rising and falling deaths resemble a row of shark teeth.

Surges are inevitable, the models predict, even when stadiums, churches, theaters, bars and restaurants remain closed, all travelers from abroad are quarantined for 14 days, and domestic travel is tightly restricted to prevent high-intensity areas from reinfecting low-intensity ones.

In his wildly popular March 19 article in Medium, “Coronavirus: The Hammer and the Dance,” Tomas Pueyo correctly predicted the national lockdown, which he called the hammer, and said it would lead to a new phase, which he called the dance, in which essential parts of the economy could reopen, including some schools and some factories with skeleton crews.

Even the “Opening Up America Again” guidelines Mr. Trump issued on Thursday have three levels of social distancing, and recommend that vulnerable Americans stay hidden. The plan endorses testing, isolation and contact tracing — but does not specify how these measures will be paid for, or how long it will take to put them in place.

On Friday, none of that stopped the president from contradicting his own message by sending out tweets encouraging protesters in Michigan, Minnesota and Virginia to fight their states’ shutdowns.

China did not allow Wuhan, Nanjing or other cities to reopen until intensive surveillance found zero new cases for 14 straight days, the virus’s incubation period.

Compared with China or Italy, the United States is still a playground.Americans can take domestic flights, drive where they want, and roam streets and parks. Despite restrictions, everyone seems to know someone discreetly arranging play dates for children, holding backyard barbecues or meeting people on dating apps.

Even with rigorous measures, Asian countries have had trouble keeping the virus under control

But if too many people get infected at once, new lockdowns will become inevitable. To avoid that, widespread testing will be imperative.

Reopening requires declining cases for 14 days, the tracing of 90 percent of contacts, an end to health care worker infections, recuperation places for mild cases and many other hard-to-reach goals.

Immunity will become a societal advantage.

Imagine an America divided into two classes: those who have recovered from infection with the coronavirus and presumably have some immunity to it; and those who are still vulnerable.

“It will be a frightening schism,” Dr. David Nabarro, a World Health Organization special envoy on Covid-19, predicted. “Those with antibodies will be able to travel and work, and the rest will be discriminated against.”

Soon the government will have to invent a way to certify who is truly immune. A test for IgG antibodies, which are produced once immunity is established, would make sense

Dr. Fauci has said the White House was discussing certificates like those proposed in Germany. China uses cellphone QR codes linked to the owner’s personal details so others cannot borrow them.

As Americans stuck in lockdown see their immune neighbors resuming their lives and perhaps even taking the jobs they lost, it is not hard to imagine the enormous temptation to join them through self-infection

My daughter, who is a Harvard economist, keeps telling me her age group needs to have Covid-19 parties to develop immunity and keep the economy going,”

It would be a gamble for American youth, too. The obese and immunocompromised are clearly at risk, but even slim, healthy young Americans have died of Covid-19.

The virus can be kept in check, but only with expanded resources.

Resolve to Save Lives, a public health advocacy group run by Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the former director of the C.D.C., has published detailed and strict criteria for when the economy can reopen and when it must be closed.

once a national baseline of hundreds of thousands of daily tests is established across the nation, any viral spread can be spotted when the percentage of positive results rises.

To keep the virus in check, several experts insisted, the country also must start isolating all the ill — including mild cases.

“If I was forced to select only one intervention, it would be the rapid isolation of all cases,”

In China, anyone testing positive, no matter how mild their symptoms, was required to immediately enter an infirmary-style hospital — often set up in a gymnasium or community center outfitted with oxygen tanks and CT scanners.

There, they recuperated under the eyes of nurses. That reduced the risk to families, and being with other victims relieved some patients’ fears.

Still, experts were divided on the idea of such wards

Ultimately, suppressing a virus requires testing all the contacts of every known case. But the United States is far short of that goal.

In China’s Sichuan Province, for example, each known case had an average of 45 contacts.

The C.D.C. has about 600 contact tracers and, until recently, state and local health departments employed about 1,600, mostly for tracing syphilis and tuberculosis cases.

China hired and trained 9,000 in Wuhan alone. Dr. Frieden recently estimated that the United States will need at least 300,000.

There will not be a vaccine soon.

any effort to make a vaccine will take at least a year to 18 months.

the record is four years, for the mumps vaccine.

for unclear reasons, some previous vaccine candidates against coronaviruses like SARS have triggered “antibody-dependent enhancement,” which makes recipients more susceptible to infection, rather than less. In the past, vaccines against H.I.V. and dengue have unexpectedly done the same.

A new vaccine is usually first tested in fewer than 100 young, healthy volunteers. If it appears safe and produces antibodies, thousands more volunteers — in this case, probably front-line workers at the highest risk — will get either it or a placebo in what is called a Phase 3 trial.

It is possible to speed up that process with “challenge trials.” Scientists vaccinate small numbers of volunteers, wait until they develop antibodies, and then “challenge” them with a deliberate infection to see if the vaccine protects them.

Normally, it is ethically unthinkable to challenge subjects with a disease with no cure, such as Covid-19.

“Fewer get harmed if you do a challenge trial in a few people than if you do a Phase 3 trial in thousands,” said Dr. Lipsitch, who recently published a paper advocating challenge trials in the Journal of Infectious Diseases. Almost immediately, he said, he heard from volunteers.

The hidden danger of challenge trials, vaccinologists explained, is that they recruit too few volunteers to show whether a vaccine creates enhancement, since it may be a rare but dangerous problem.

if a vaccine is invented, the United States could need 300 million doses — or 600 million if two shots are required. And just as many syringes.

“People have to start thinking big,” Dr. Douglas said. “With that volume, you’ve got to start cranking it out pretty soon.”

Treatments are likely to arrive first.

The modern alternative is monoclonal antibodies. These treatment regimens, which recently came very close to conquering the Ebola epidemic in eastern Congo, are the most likely short-term game changer, experts said.

as with vaccines, growing and purifying monoclonal antibodies takes time. In theory, with enough production, they could be used not just to save lives but to protect front-line workers.

Having a daily preventive pill would be an even better solution, because pills can be synthesized in factories far faster than vaccines or antibodies can be grown and purified.

Goodbye, ‘America First.’

A public health crisis of this magnitude requires international cooperation on a scale not seen in decades. Yet Mr. Trump is moving to defund the W.H.O., the only organization capable of coordinating such a response.

And he spent most of this year antagonizing China, which now has the world’s most powerful functioning economy and may become the dominant supplier of drugs and vaccines. China has used the pandemic to extend its global influence, and says it has sent medical gear and equipment to nearly 120 countries.

This is not a world in which “America First” is a viable strategy, several experts noted.

“If President Trump cares about stepping up the public health efforts here, he should look for avenues to collaborate with China and stop the insults,”

If we alienate the Chinese with our rhetoric, I think it will come back to bite us,” he said.“What if they come up with the first vaccine? They have a choice about who they sell it to. Are we top of the list? Why would we be?”

Once the pandemic has passed, the national recovery may be swift. The economy rebounded after both world wars, Dr. Mulder noted.

In one of the most provocative analyses in his follow-up article, “Coronavirus: Out of Many, One,” Mr. Pueyo analyzed Medicare and census data on age and obesity in states that recently resisted shutdowns and counties that voted Republican in 2016.

He calculated that those voters could be 30 percent more likely to die of the virus.

In the periods after both wars, Dr. Mulder noted, society and incomes became more equal. Funds created for veterans’ and widows’ pensions led to social safety nets, measures like the G.I. Bill and V.A. home loans were adopted, unions grew stronger, and tax benefits for the wealthy withered.

If a vaccine saves lives, many Americans may become less suspicious of conventional medicine and more accepting of science in general — including climate change

In fact, it appears, the data suggest, the overall battle-death toll in modern organized societies is exponentially higher than in hunter–gatherer societies surveyed during the past 200 years.

compared annual war deaths for 11 chimpanzee communities, 24 hunter–gatherer or other nonstate groups and 19 and 22 countries that fought in World Wars I and II, respectively

People, their data show, have evolved to be more violent than chimps. And, despite high rates of violent death in comparison with population size, nonstate groups are on average no more or less violent than those living in organized societies.

The outsize rise in total war-related deaths associated with larger groups of people may be due, in part, to the advances in weaponry and military strategy that come with increased communication and collaboration: A similar degree of violent behavior enacted by a similar number of people just does more damage on a nuclear scale than it ever could with axes and spears

Pinker points out many anthropologists are committed to some version of the noble savage theory—the idea that in the wild humans are innately good, only to be corrupted by society and civilization. Falk acknowledges this, in part, motivated her to undertake the study. “As anthropologists we were primarily concerned about the negative portrayal of small-scale societies as more violent than “civilized” state dwellers.”

Pinker cites a number of trends through history he feels support the idea that despite the seemingly continual carnage in the world, we have actually inched toward a more civil society. Our transition from hunter–gatherers to farmers is thought to have reduced violent death fivefold; between the Middle Ages and the 20th century, Europe saw a 10- to 50-fold drop in murder; and in the 70-plus years since World War II warring among the leading powers has for the most part stopped, a first in the history of civilization.

None of this gives Falk much comfort when it comes to mass-scale war and mortality, given that modern weaponry can inflict sky-high total death counts. Astronomical death tolls can be tallied in a matter of days, even minutes, not decades. “All it would take is for one homicidal leader—who we know exists—to unleash a weapon of mass destruction,” she warns. “The 70-odd years that have transpired since World War II is a proverbial drop in the bucket compared with the five [million] to seven million years humans and our ancestors have been around. The probability of World War III is not negligible.”

Larger vehicles, such as the popular SUVs and trucks that dominate new car sales, are more dangerous for pedestrians than sedans. Meanwhile, the federal government doesn't mandate safety tests that consider pedestrian safety, only those that protect vehicle occupants.

In addition to releasing preliminary statistics for 2020, the GHSA also took a deep dive into figures from 2019 and before. The group reported about a third of pedestrians were intoxicated when they were struck, and deaths are more common at night and in warm states (possibly because warmer weather encourages nighttime walking). This year, for the first time, the GHSA also broke out data by race and found Black, Native American and Hispanic people were substantially overrepresented in pedestrian deaths, compared with their proportion of the overall population.

That trend, too, predates the pandemic. But Naomi Doerner, director of equity, diversity and inclusion at transportation consulting firm Nelson\Nygaard, notes the disparities of the pandemic affected pedestrian vulnerability, too.

After Sammy's death, Cohen co-founded a group called Families for Safe Streets that provides support to victims' families and advocates for policy changes to reduce traffic deaths. Slower speed limits and street redesigns such as wider sidewalks, narrow roads and rumble strips are among the group's priorities.

For Pho, the months since her mother's death have been anguished, her grief compounded by painful legal and criminal proceedings, and by the wave of anti-Asian harassment unfolding during the pandemic.

But she said she's found it healing to reach out to local advocacy groups such as Cohen's that are working to make streets safer."It's a trend that's just going to continue if we don't address it," Pho says. "It is a crisis."

Following the execution, the prison released a statement addressed to Mr. Higgs from Ms. Jackson’s younger sister, whom it did not identify by name. “When the day is over, your death will not bring my sister and the other victims back. This is not closure, this is the consequence of your actions,” it said.

Mr. Higgs delivered a final statement before he was put to death. “The tone of his voice when he said his final words was calm but in substance Higgs was defiant,” according to an Associated Press pool report. “‘I’d like to say I am an innocent man,’ he said, mentioning the three women by name. ‘I did not order the murders.’”

The federal death chamber, at the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind., likely will be mothballed after Mr. Higgs’s execution. No further executions currently are scheduled, and Mr. Biden, who has called for the legal abolition of capital punishment, is unlikely to approve any others. With Mr. Higgs’s execution, 50 inmates will remain on the federal death row, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, which is critical of capital punishment.

The government, arguing that litigating the issue would needlessly delay Mr. Higgs’s execution, asked the Supreme Court to overrule the lower courts. Friday’s order did just that, directing “the prompt designation of Indiana” as the state whose death penalty procedures should be followed. The majority provided no legal explanation for the decision, but in prior cases some conservative justices have complained that condemned inmates game the system by filing last-minute appeals to prolong their lives.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, a member of the White House's coronavirus task force, also pushed back against the President's claim on Sunday when asked about it, telling ABC News that "the deaths are real deaths.

Trump and Fauci have had an at-times rocky relationship during the pandemic, with the top infectious disease expert occasionally criticizing the President's actions related to the crisis and Trump openly trashing Fauci and suggesting in early November that he might fire him after the election.

Cases have skyrocketed after the Thanksgiving holiday, and while impacts from Christmas and New Year's celebrations are still unfolding, at least 123,639 people nationwide were in the hospital with the virus on Saturday, marking 32 consecutive days that the number of hospitalizations has exceeded 100,000, according to the Covid Tracking Project.

Adams, when pressed Sunday about his projection in December that there would be 20 million Americans vaccinated by the end of 2020, defended the administration's handling of the rollout, even as just 4 million people in the US have been given a shot.

Around 6.4 million coronavirus cases have been confirmed around the world, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. More than 383,000 people have died, including some 107,000 in the US. More than 2.7 million have recovered from the disease.

President Jair Bolsonaro has repeatedly downplayed the threat of the virus, saying on Tuesday that death was "everyone's destiny."

AP news agency quoted the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as saying that the newly reported cases raised the country’s total to 11,629 with 273 deaths.

The agency says 10,499 of them have recovered while 857 remains in treatment for the virus.

Here are the latest updates

Mexico reports new one-day high of 1,092 coronavirus deaths

Mexico has more than 101,000 cases and more than 11,000 deaths.

A 9-month-old who tested positive for COVID-19 was among eight more people whose deaths were related to the coronavirus in the US state of Kentucky, Governor Andy Beshear has announced.

The latest deaths raised the statewide death toll to 450 since the pandemic began. There are more than 107,000 fatalities across the US.

in the early 1340s, the disease had struck China, India, Persia, Syria and Egypt.

They know that the bacillus travels from person to person pneumonically, or through the air, as well as through the bite of infected fleas and rats.

The Black Death was terrifyingly, indiscriminately contagious

Today, scientists understand that the Black Death, now known as the plague, is spread by a bacillus called Yersina pestis.

However, Europeans were scarcely equipped for the horrible reality of the Black Death.

Not long after it struck Messina, the Black Death spread to the port of Marseilles in France and the port of Tunis in North Africa

Then it reached Rome and Florence, two cities at the center of an elaborate web of trade routes.

Today, this grim sequence of events is terrifying but comprehensible

No one knew exactly how the Black Death was transmitted from one patient to another, and no one knew how to prevent or treat it

Meanwhile, in a panic, healthy people did all they could to avoid the sick

Because they did not understand the biology of the disease, many people believed that the Black Death was a kind of divine punishment – retribution for sins against God such as greed, blasphemy, heresy, fornication and worldliness.

compared with the citizens of these nations, American infants are less likely to turn 5, American teenagers are less likely to turn 30, and American 30-somethings are less likely to survive to retirement.

I called the U.S. the rich death trap of the modern world. The “rich” part is important to observe and hard to overstate. The typical American spends almost 50 percent more each year than the typical Brit, and a trucker in Oklahoma earns more than a doctor in Portugal.

A series about big problems and big solutions

the typical American is 100 percent more likely to die than the typical Western European at almost every age from birth until retirement.

magine I offered you a pill and told you that taking this mystery medication would have two effects. First, it would increase your disposable income by almost half. Second, it would double your odds of dying in the next 365 days. To be an average American is to fill a lifetime prescription of that medication and take the pill nightly.

A series about big problems and big solutions

1.8 figure as “the U.S. death ratio”—the annual mortality rate in the U.S., as a multiple of similarly rich countries.

By the time an American turns 18, the U.S. death ratio surges to 2.8. By 29, the U.S. death ratio rockets to its peak of 4.22, meaning that the typical American is more than four times more likely to die than the average resident in our basket of high-income nations.

The average American my age, in his mid-to-late 30s, is roughly six times more likely to die in the next year than his counterpart in Switzerland.

The average U.S. death ratio stays higher than three for practically the entire period between ages 30 and 50, meaning that the typical middle-aged American is roughly three times more likely to die within the year than his counterpart in Western Europe or Australia.

One could tell a similar story about drug

America suffers not from a monopoly on despair and aggression, but from an oversupply of instruments of death. We have more drug-overdose deaths than any other high-income country because we have so much more fentanyl, even per capita

Americans drive more than other countries, leading to our higher-than-average death rate from road accidents

I expected that these three culprits—guns, drugs, and cars—would explain most of our death ratio

he argued that Americans’ health (and access to health care) seems to be the most important factor. America’s prevalence of cardiovascular and metabolic disease is so high that it accounts for more of our early mortality than guns, drugs, and cars combined.

Disentangling America’s health issues is complicated, but I can offer three data points

First, American obesity is unusually high, which likely leads to a larger number of early and middle-aged death

Second, Americans are unusually sedentary. We take at least 30 percent fewer steps a day than people do in Australia, Switzerland, and Japan

Finally, U.S. access to care is unusually unequal—and our health-care outcomes are unusually tied to income.

voters and politicians in the U.S. care so much about freedom in that old-fashioned ’Merica-lovin’ kind of way that we’re unwilling to promote public safety if those rules constrict individual choice. That’s how you get a country with infamously laissez-faire firearms laws, more guns than people, lax and poorly enforced driving laws, and a conservative movement that has repeatedly tried to block, overturn, or limit the expansion of universal health insurance on the grounds that it impedes consumer choice.

Among the rich, this hyper-individualistic mindset can manifest as a smash-and-grab attitude toward life, with surprising consequences for the less fortunate. For example, childhood obesity is on the rise at the same time that youth-sports participation is in decline among low-income kids

What seems to be happening at the national level is that rich families, seeking to burnish their child’s résumé for college, are pulling their kids out of local leagues so that they can participate in prestigious pay-to-play travel teams. At scale, these decisions devastate the local youth-sports leagues for the benefit of increasing by half a percentage point the odds of a wealthy kid getting into an Ivy League school.

The problem with the Freedom and Individualism Theory of Everything is that, in many cases, America’s problem isn’t freedom-worship, but actually something quite like its opposite: overregulation

In medicine, excessive regulation and risk aversion on the part of the FDA and Institutional Review Boards have very likely slowed the development and adoption of new lifesaving treatments.

Are Americans unusually sedentary because they love freedom so very much? It’s possible, I guess. But the more likely explanation is that restrictive housing policies have made it too hard for middle- and low-income families to live near downtown business districts, which forces many of them to drive more than they would like, thus reducing everyday walking and exercise.

America is caught in a lurch between oversight and overkill, sometimes promoting individual freedom, with luridly fatal consequences, and sometimes blocking policies and products, with subtly fatal consequences.

if this is true, why do we hear so much about crime rates, opioids and gun violence in America, but so little from our elected leaders about the crisis of poverty? Why is there no “Surgeon General’s Warning” on low-wage jobs?

we as a people have become numb to the unnecessary deaths that are normalized by the ways we often think and talk about the economy in public life.

the United States is the leader in poverty among the rich countries of the world. As of 2019, the US had the worst poverty rate overall (17.8%) and in children specifically (20.9%) among the other 25 wealthy countries that are part of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

Seventy-five percent of all Americans between 20-75 years of age will be among the “current” poor or near poverty for at least one year of their lives.

Contrary to popular belief, poverty is hardly just the province of the inner city: only 10% of poor Americans live in high-poverty census tracts – most are spread out across the country. They are our neighbors. And although the rates of poverty are highest among communities of color, by sheer volume most people living in poverty are white.

poverty is a drag on our economy. Child poverty alone in the US presents an $800bn to $1.1tn price tag, based on reductions in adult productivity, criminal justice costs and the costs of healthcare for children from poor families.

Matthew Desmond, a sociologist at Princeton University, estimates that we could lift everyone within our borders above the poverty line for less than 1% of our national GDP – $177bn. Ending poverty is within our grasp. It is something we can accomplish together. So what’s stopping us?

As the economists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson said in their 2012 book Why Nations Fail, “those who have power make choices that create poverty. They get it wrong not by mistake or ignorance but on purpose”.

recent book Poverty, By America: “Tens of millions of Americans do not end up poor by a mistake of history or personal conduct. Poverty persists because some wish and will it to.”

The incentives for maintaining the status quo, for keeping many Americans poor, rest on the fact that some people find considerable financial benefit from presiding over the misery of others

what a young Friedrich Engels – observing the deaths of factory-workers, the conditions of the slums, and the exploitation of children in Manchester, England in the mid-19th century – called “social murder”. Many were dying, while a few made a killing from their suffering. It was true then, and it is true now.

“Woe unto those who make unjust laws and rob the poor of their right.” But this prophetic challenge isn’t a condemnation. It is an invitation to life. Together, we can become the land of “liberty and justice for all” that has never yet bee

The low-income, middle-income and high-income health systems have extremely different problems. You know, in low-income countries, getting to a health post is hard. It’s very expensive. Whereas in rich countries, yes, you can get to your doctor. In low-income countries, the main problems you have is infectious diseases. We’re dealing with countries that in the worst case where kids have death rates of 20 percent and that’s all infectious disease. And nothing else. In the U.S., in terms of kids under 5, other than premature birth, you really don’t have big problems. Kids just don’t die of infectious disease.

in the U.S., what do people die of? From age 5 till age 50, you’ve got suicide, you’ve got traffic accidents. There’s very little cancer and heart disease before age 50.

what’s a year of life worth? They call it a disability-adjusted life year (DALY). When you’re running a poor country health-care system, you can’t treat a year of life as being worth more than, say, $200, $300 or else you’ll bankrupt your health system immediately. So, with very few exceptions, you do nothing for cancer. If you get cancer, you’re going to die. And so none of the stuff that’s going on in the U.S. about $300,000 a year chemotherapy drugs is relevant.

If you spend the less than 2 percent of what the rich countries spend, but you spend it on vaccinations and antibiotics, you get over half of all that healthcare does to extend life. So you spend 2 percent and you get 50 percent. If you spend another 80 percent you’re at over 90 percent.

in rich-world health, innovation is both your friend and your enemy. Innovation is inventing organ replacement, joint replacement. We’re inventing ways of doing new things that cost $300,000 and take people in their 70s and, on average, give them an extra, say, two or three years of life. And then you have to say, given finite resources, should we fire two or three teachers to do this operation? And with chemotherapies, we’ve got things where we’ll spend our dollars on treatments where you’re valuing a life here at over $10 to $20 million. Really big, big numbers, which if you were infinitely rich, of course that would be fine. So most innovations, unfortunately, actually increase the net costs of the healthcare system. There’s a few, particularly having to do with chronic diseases, that are an exception. If you could cure Alzheimer’s, if you could avoid diabetes — those are gigantic in terms of saving money. But the incentive regime doesn’t favor them.

We’re very uncomfortable putting a value on human life. The way I see our health system is we’ve chosen to pay a huge premium in order to avoid these questions. A prerequisite for the kind of cost-cutting innovations you’re talking about it is being willing to make judgments about what a human life is worth, or even what a few months of a human life are worth. Because if you can’t decide that, then of course you just pay for everything. But if you start trying to make those choices, or even get people to think about those choices, people cry “death panels!”

BG. Yes, someone in the society has to deal with the reality that there are finite resources and we’re making trade-offs, and be explicit about that. When the car companies were found to have a memo that actually said, “This safety feature costs X and saved Y lives,” the very existence of that memo was considered damning. It was “Oh, you think human life is only a bank account.” Or when you made it reimbursable for a doctor to ask, “Do you want heroic care at the end-of-life,” that was a death panel. No, it wasn’t a death panel! It was asking somebody to make a decision.

The very reasons that we know something about Auschwitz warp our understanding of the Holocaust: we know about Auschwitz because there were survivors, and there were survivors because Auschwitz was a labor camp as well as a death factory. These survivors were largely West European Jews, because Auschwitz is where West European Jews were usually sent. After World War II, West European Jewish survivors were free to write and publish as they liked, whereas East European Jewish survivors, if caught behind the iron curtain, could not. In the West, memoirs of the Holocaust could (although very slowly) enter into historical writing and public consciousness.

By 1943 and 1944, when most of the killing of West European Jews took place, the Holocaust was in considerable measure complete. Two thirds of the Jews who would be killed during the war were already dead by the end of 1942. The main victims, the Polish and Soviet Jews, had been killed by bullets fired over death pits or by carbon monoxide from internal combustion engines pumped into gas chambers at Treblinka, Be zec, and Sobibor in occupied Poland.

the other state that killed Europeans en masse in the middle of the century: the Soviet Union. In the entire Stalinist period, between 1928 and 1953, Soviet policies killed, in a conservative estimate, well over five million Europeans

In shorthand, then, the Holocaust was, in order: Operation Reinhardt, Shoah by bullets, Auschwitz; or Poland, the Soviet Union, the rest. Of the 5.7 million or so Jews killed, roughly 3 million were pre-war Polish citizens, and another 1 million or so pre-war Soviet citizens: taken together, 70 percent of the total. (After the Polish and Soviet Jews, the next-largest groups of Jews killed were Romanian, Hungarian, and Czechoslovak. If these people are considered, the East European character of the Holocaust becomes even clearer.)

The Final Solution, as the Nazis called it, was originally only one of the exterminatory projects to be implemented after a victorious war against the Soviet Union. Had things gone the way that Hitler, Himmler, and Göring expected, German forces would have implemented a Hunger Plan in the Soviet Union in the winter of 1941–1942. As Ukrainian and south Russian agricultural products were diverted to Germany, some 30 million people in Belarus, northern Russia, and Soviet cities were to be starved to death. The Hunger Plan was only a prelude to Generalplan Ost, the colonization plan for the western Soviet Union, which foresaw the elimination of some 50 million people.

The Germans did manage to carry out policies that bore some resemblance to these plans

The Germans killed somewhat more than ten million civilians in the major mass killing actions, about half of them Jews, about half of them non-Jews. The Jews and the non-Jews mostly came from the same part of Europe. The project to kill all Jews was substantially realized; the project to destroy Slavic populations was only very partially implemented.

German suffering under Hitler and during the war, though dreadful in scale, does not figure at the center of the history of mass killing. Even if the ethnic Germans killed during flight from the Red Army, expulsion from Poland and Czechoslovakia in 1945–1947, and the firebombings in Germany are included, the total number of German civilians killed by state power remains comparatively small

when one considers the total number of European civilians killed by totalitarian powers in the middle of the twentieth century, one should have in mind three groups of roughly equal size: Jews killed by Germans, non-Jews killed by Germans, and Soviet citizens killed by the Soviet state.

An adequate vision of the Holocaust would place Operation Reinhardt, the murder of the Polish Jews in 1942, at the center of its history. Polish Jews were the largest Jewish community in the world, Warsaw the most important Jewish city. This community was exterminated at Treblinka, Be zec, and Sobibor. Some 1.5 million Jews were killed at those three facilities, about 780,863 at Treblinka alone. Only a few dozen people survived these three death facilities. Be zec, though the third most important killing site of the Holocaust, after Auschwitz and Treblinka, is hardly known. Some 434,508 Jews perished at that death factory, and only two or three survived.

We know about the Gulag because it was a system of labor camps, but not a set of killing facilities. The Gulag held about 30 million people and shortened some three million lives. But a vast majority of those people who were sent to the camps returned alive.

the Gulag distracts us from the Soviet policies that killed people directly and purposefully, by starvation and bullets. Of the Stalinist killing policies, two were the most significant: the collectivization famines of 1930–1933 and the Great Terror of 1937–1938.

It is established beyond reasonable doubt that Stalin intentionally starved to death Soviet Ukrainians in the winter of 1932–1933. Soviet documents reveal a series of orders of October–December 1932 with evident malice and intention to kill. By the end, more than three million inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine had died.

The largest action of the Great Terror, Operation 00447, was aimed chiefly at “kulaks,” which is to say peasants who had already been oppressed during collectivization. It claimed 386,798 lives. A few national minorities, representing together less than 2 percent of the Soviet population, yielded more than a third of the fatalities of the Great Terror.

If we concentrate on Auschwitz and the Gulag, we fail to notice that over a period of twelve years, between 1933 and 1944, some 12 million victims of Nazi and Soviet mass killing policies perished in a particular region of Europe, one defined more or less by today’s Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia.

mass killing happened, predominantly, in the parts of Europe between Germany and Russia, not in Germany and Russia themselves.

Soviet repressions are identified with the Gulag

During the war, many Soviet Russians were killed by the Germans, but far fewer proportionately than Belarusians and Ukrainians, not to mention Jews. Soviet civilian deaths are estimated at about 15 million. About one in twenty-five civilians in Russia was killed by the Germans during the war, as opposed to about one in ten in Ukraine (or Poland) or about one in five in Belarus.

Poland was attacked and occupied not by one but by both totalitarian states between 1939 and 1941, as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, then allies, exploited its territories and exterminated much of its intelligentsia at that time. Poland’s capital was the site of not one but two of the major uprisings against German power during World War II: the ghetto uprising of Warsaw Jews in 1943, after which the ghetto was leveled; and the Warsaw Uprising of the Polish Home Army in 1944, after which the rest of the city was destroyed.

By starving Soviet prisoners of war, shooting and gassing Jews, and shooting civilians in anti-partisan actions, German forces made Belarus the deadliest place in the world between 1941 and 1944. Half of the population of Soviet Belarus was either killed or forcibly displaced during World War II: nothing of the kind can be said of any other European country.

Although the history of mass killing has much to do with economic calculation, memory shuns anything that might seem to make murder appear rational. Both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union followed a path to economic self-sufficiency, Germany wishing to balance industry with an agrarian utopia in the East, the USSR wishing to overcome its agrarian backwardness with rapid industrialization and urbanization. Both regimes were aiming for economic autarky in a large empire, in which both sought to control Eastern Europe. Both of them saw the Polish state as a historical aberration; both saw Ukraine and its rich soil as indispensable. They defined different groups as the enemies of their designs, although the German plan to kill every Jew is unmatched by any Soviet policy in the totality of its aims. What is crucial is that the ideology that legitimated mass death was also a vision of economic develop-ment. In a world of scarcity, particularly of food supplies, both regimes integrated mass murder with economic planning.

If there is a general political lesson of the history of mass killing, it is the need to be wary of what might be called privileged development: attempts by states to realize a form of economic expansion that designates victims, that motivates prosperity by mortality. The possibility cannot be excluded that the murder of one group can benefit another, or at least can be seen to do so. That is a version of politics that Europe has in fact witnessed and may witness again. The only sufficient answer is an ethical commitment to the individual, such that the individual counts in life rather than in death, and schemes of this sort become unthinkable.

In all but a handful of instances, the shooter was male. Boys also accounted for more than 80 percent of the victims.

The Times sought to identify every accidental firearm death of a child age 14 and under in Georgia, Minnesota, North Carolina and Ohio dating to 1999, and in California to 2007. Records were also obtained from several county medical examiners’ offices in Florida, Illinois and Texas.

In four of the five states — California, Georgia, North Carolina and Ohio — The Times identified roughly twice as many accidental killings as were tallied in the corresponding federal data.

Another important aspect of firearm accidents is that a vast majority of victims do not die. Tracking these injuries nationally, however, is arguably just as problematic as tallying fatalities, according to public health researchers. In fact, national figures often cited from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Web site are an estimate, projected from a sampling taken from hospital emergency departments. Nevertheless, in 2011, the most recent year with available data, the agency estimated that there were 847 unintentional nonfatal firearm injuries among children 14 and under.

More concrete are actual counts of emergency department visits, which are available in a small number of states. In North Carolina, for instance, there were more than 120 such visits for nonfatal gun accidents among children 17 and under in 2010, the most recent year for which data is available.

While about 60 percent of the accidental firearm deaths identified by The Times involved handguns as opposed to long guns, that number was much higher — more than 85 percent — when the victims were very young, under the age of 6. In fact, the average handgun victim was several years younger than long gun victims: between 7 and 8, compared with almost 11.

Over all, the largest number of deaths came at the upper end of the age range, with ages 13 and 14 being most common — not necessarily surprising, given that parents generally allow adolescents greater access to guns. But the third-most common age was 3 (tied with 12), a particularly vulnerable age, when children are curious and old enough to manipulate a firearm but ignorant of the dangers.

About half of the accidents took place inside the child’s home. A third, however, occurred at the house of a friend or a relative, pointing to a potential vulnerability if safe-storage laws apply only to households with children, as in North Carolina.

Even in accidental shootings where criminals were in some way involved, they usually were not the ones pulling the trigger. Rather, they — like many law-abiding adults in these cases — simply left a gun unsecured.

In state after state and often with considerable success, gun rights groups have cited the federal numbers as proof that the problem is nearly inconsequential and that storage laws are unnecessary. Gun Owners of America says on its Web site that children are “130 percent more likely to die from choking on their dinner” than from accidental shootings.

Under the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention figures, in fact, gun accidents were the ninth-leading cause of unintentional deaths among children ages 1 to 14 in 2010. (The agency reported 62 such killings that year.) If the actual numbers are, in fact, roughly double, however, gun accidents would rise into the top five or six.

The rifle association and its allies also often note that studies on the impact of safe-storage laws have found mixed results. But those studies are based on the flawed government statistics. “When we’re evaluating child access laws, we’re using total trash data,

A safe-storage bill was introduced in the Ohio legislature in February, prompted by a shooting that killed three students at a high school in suburban Cleveland. But the measure, which would prohibit storing a firearm in a residence in a place readily accessible to a child, has encountered skepticism from the Republicans who control the legislature. “The tenor was, somebody breaks in, do I have time enough to get to my gun?” said State Representative Bill Patmon, a Democrat who introduced the bill.

The N.R.A. has long argued that better education is the key to preventing gun accidents, citing its Eddie Eagle GunSafe program, which teaches children as young as 3 that if they see a gun, they should “stop, don’t touch, leave the area and tell an adult.” The association, which did not respond to a request for comment, says its program has reached more than 26 million children in all 50 states and should be credited for the deep decline in accidental gun deaths shown in federal statistics dating to the mid-1980s.

Beyond the unreliability of the federal data, public health experts have disputed the N.R.A.’s claims, pointing to other potential explanations for the decline, including improvements in emergency medical care, along with data showing fewer households with firearms. They also highlight research indicating that admonishing children to stay away from guns is often ineffective.

As part of Dr. Kellermann’s study, researchers watched through a one-way mirror as pairs of boys ages 8 to 12 were left alone in an examination room at a clinic in Atlanta. Unknown to the children, an inoperative .38-caliber handgun was concealed in a cabinet drawer.

Playing and exploring over the next 15 minutes, one boy after another — three-quarters of the 64 children — found the gun. Two-thirds handled it, and one-third actually pulled the trigger. Just one child went to tell an adult about the gun, and he was teased by his peers for it. More than 90 percent of the boys said they had had some gun safety instruction.

Other research has found that simply having a firearm in the household is correlated with an increased risk of accidental shooting death. In one study, published in 2003 in the journal Accident Analysis and Prevention, the risk was more than three times as high for one gun, and almost four times as high for more than one.

requiring, or even encouraging, efforts to introduce “smart gun” technology remains unpopular with the gun lobby, which has worked to undermine such research and attempts to regulate firearms as a dangerous consumer product.

But Taurus backed out within a few months, citing competing priorities, and the project fell apart. Charles Vehlow, Metal Storm’s chief executive at the time, said that while he did not know exactly what pressures Taurus faced, there was a general wariness of smart-gun efforts among manufacturers and pro-gun groups. “There was no question that the N.R.A. was very sensitive and was aware of what we were doing,” he said.

The Colt’s Manufacturing Company and Smith & Wesson experienced a backlash against their own smart-gun programs, which were abandoned amid financial problems caused, in part, by boycotts from gun groups and others in the industry. So unpopular was the whole smart-gun concept that Colt’s Manufacturing later could not even find a buyer for its patents, said Carlton Chen, a former lawyer for the company.

Gun rights lobbyists have also helped keep firearms and ammunition beyond the reach of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which has the power to regulate other products that are dangerous to children. The N.R.A. argues that the commission would provide a back door for gun control advocates to restrict the manufacture of firearms. Proponents of regulation say guns pose too great a hazard to exclude them from scrutiny.

The case of Lockhart — whose brigade had a dozen other men charged with murder or attempted murder after coming home from Iraq — is highlighted in a new report by the Death Penalty Information Center, a group that opposes capital punishment.

"At a time in which the death penalty is being imposed less and less, it is disturbing that so many veterans who were mentally and emotionally scarred while serving their country are now facing execution," said Robert Dunham, the center's executive director.

About 300 veterans are on death row nationwide, about 10 percent of all those condemned to die, the group estimates.

It's unclear how many have been diagnosed with PTSD or have symptoms, but Dunham says that in too many cases, a veteran's mental scars are not examined closely enough by defense lawyers, prosecutors, judges, juries and governors who can commute death sentences.

Lower gas prices are one possible reason. When gasoline is cheaper, people drive more—and more time on the road translates into more fatal accidents.

For instance, the increase in traffic deaths exceeded 20 percent in the region that includes Alaska, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Montana, but only went up by about 3 percent in the region that includes California, Arizona, Hawaii, and other Pacific territories.

But while car-safety technology has improved dramatically in recent decades, handguns have barely changed in a century.

Gun deaths surpassed motor-vehicle deaths in 21 states plus the District of Columbia in 2014, according to analysis by the Violence Policy Center.

The ruling means the case of Timothy Lee Hurst, who was convicted of the stabbing murder of his co-worker in 1998, goes back to the lower courts.

Connie Fuselier, the mother of Hurst's victim, said she doesn't care if he is executed at this point, but she can't bear the thought of more legal proceedings. "It's been hell," she told NBC News. "When you get to thinking it's over with, it starts all over again. It's nerve-racking."

"The substance of the ruling would affect the vast majority of Florida's death row inmates," said Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, which opposes capital punishment. "The remaining question would be: Will the Supreme Court consider this to have retroactive effect and retroactive to when?" He said he expects the ruling will unleash a wave of litigation.

It's not yet clear how many other cases — including the 400 inmates on the state's death row — could be affected, experts said.

At one point during the many appeals the case has spawned, Fuselier said, she told the prosecutor she'd be satisfied with a sentence of life without parole.

"I just want it over with. I want to know he has no more appeals," she said. She said the case's 17-year journey through the courts, with the rehashing of the gruesome details of her daughter's death, has taken a toll on the family. "I have post-traumatic stress. I have depression," she said. "It's like the family evaporated. We're all here, but it's like we're not."

The U.S. government launched the effort when it became apparent that U.S. expertise in disease modeling was outstripped by England’s world-class experts, said Dylan George, a former Obama administration official at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy who was involved in that effort.

what remains unclear and alarming to many modelers is whether the White House is using their data to create a coordinated, coherent long-term strategy.

Any numbers we see today — confirmed cases, hospitalizations and deaths — lag two to three weeks behind how the virus is spreading. So decisions made by authorities based on that present-day data are, almost by definition, reactive and potentially come too late.

Shaman doesn’t think the White House’s death projection is too low, nor does he think it’s too late to act decisively.“I think we can come in under 100,000 deaths. I do,” he said. “The jury is not yet in on this.”

"The government completed its unprecedented slaughter of 13 human beings tonight by killing Dustin Higgs, a Black man who never killed anyone, on Martin Luther King's birthday,

In his final words, Higgs repeated his claim to innocence. "I'd like to say I am an innocent man," he said, mentioning the three women by name. "I did not order the murders."Higgs was the third to die at a federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana this week including Lisa Montgomery, the only woman on federal death row on Wednesday.

A court had ordered a stay of execution for Higgs and another inmate, Corey Johnson, on Tuesday after they contracted Covid-19 on death row - with lawyers arguing damage to their lung tissue would cause painful suffering during their executions.But the Department of Justice immediately appealed and won the case. Johnson was put to death on Thursday.

Higgs was convicted in the killings of three women in a wildlife refuge in 1996, but until his death denied ordering their murder. He died by lethal injection at 01:23 local time (06:23 GMT) on Saturday.His execution is the 13th carried out since July when the US government ended a 17-year hiatus on federal executions.It comes just days before President-elect Joe Biden, who is against the death penalty, is sworn in.

There has been criticism of the Trump administration's rush to carry out the sentences - breaking with an 130-year-old precedent of pausing executions during a presidential transition.

Higgs was convicted and sentenced to death in 2001 for overseeing the 1996 kidnapping and murder of three women: Tanji Jackson, Tamika Black and Mishann Chinn.

A final bid to halt Higgs's execution then failed on Friday when the US Supreme Court's conservative majority voted 6-3 to clear the way the sentence to be carried out.