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America’s failings — and, for that matter, Britain’s — were made all the more stark by successes elsewhere. “South Korea rolled out testing at ‘walk-in’ booths all over the country, then used credit card records and location data from mobile phones to trace the movements of infected people — a tactic Britain has failed to master after months of effort,” Pankaj Mishra wrote in an essay for the London Review of Books that excoriated the Anglo-American handling of the crisis. “Other East Asian countries such as Taiwan and Singapore are also faring much better. Vietnam swiftly routed the virus.”

Its struggles may come to mark a historic inflection point: the moment the world’s preeminent superpower had to relinquish a certain vision of its own primacy as other countries — especially some rising powers in Asia — led the way.

“Covid-19 has exposed the world’s greatest democracies as victims of prolonged self-harm,” wrote Mishra, pointing to both the United States’ punitively expensive health-care system and the hollowing out of Britain’s social services. “It has also demonstrated that countries with strong state capacity have been far more successful at stemming the virus’s spread and look better equipped to cope with the social and economic fallout.”

ut simply, COVID-19 is mostly a talking disease—one that could be brought to heel with universal mask wearing, a national campaign that emphasizes quiet in public spaces, and harsh laws about indoor gatherings.

None of this is breaking news. We’ve known most of it for a while. In the spring, a raft of CDC studies—from a Chinese restaurant, a Korean call center, and an American choir practice—made it clear that talking, laughing, and singing in close quarters for many hours is the perfect storm for a super-spreader event.

- If these aerosolized particles spread easily in unventilated indoor spaces … we should shut down and bail out indoor businesses that naturally invite crowding and talking, such as bars.

President Trump did not create the coronavirus, but his failure to act swiftly and implement extensive testing and contact tracing left us with one option: extreme social distancing.

And naturally, social distancing meant the economy ground to a halt. In that sense, the recession is a product of Trump’s mismanagement and willful ignorance. And that recession will be frightfully severe.

“The past two weeks have erased nearly all the jobs created in the past five years, a sign of how rapid, deep and painful the economic shutdown has been on many American families who are struggling to pay rent and health insurance costs in the midst of a pandemic.”

Don’t just blame President Trump. Blame me — and all the other Republicans who aided and abetted and, yes, benefited from protecting a political party that has become dangerous to America. Some of us knew better.

But we built this moment. And then we looked the other way.

The failures of the government’s response to the coronavirus crisis can be traced directly to some of the toxic fantasies now dear to the Republican Party. Here are a few: Government is bad. Establishment experts are overrated or just plain wrong. Science is suspect. And we can go it alone, the world be damned.

governors must also use this time to work with businesses on a plan for reopening the economy in a way that mitigates health risks. The White House is reportedly discussing ways to ease restrictions as early as next week, but local and state officials will have to produce well-considered plans to open up the economy in a relatively safe way.

A blanket lockdown can’t go on. Keeping every business closed and every worker at home until a vaccine is available won’t work

If this were the plague, with 50% of the infected dying, it might be a different story. But people won’t put up with losing many trillions of dollars to flatten the curve of this virus.

Hackensack’s study is expected to expand as more volunteers who have been infected with the virus meet a crucial threshold: Candidates must be healthy for at least 14 days and free of all traces of the virus. Of more than 3,000 people who have offered to be donors, only 38 have met the initial screening criteria.

A donor’s blood must also have high levels of antibodies, proteins made by the immune system to attack the virus.

The antibody-rich blood product, known as convalescent plasma, has not yet been proven to help those sick with Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. “But this is one of the only treatments that we have at present,” the Mayo Clinic notes on its website.

• The spread. From the time the first case emerged in Wuhan on Nov. 17 to the moment when China/the World Health Organization acknowledged human-to-human transmission on Jan. 20, Wuhan exported between eight and 16 undetected cases to the U.S. through air travel, giving rise to 1,000 to 9,000 cases in the U.S. by March 1, according to a U.S.-Chinese modeling project.

many of the virus strains circulating in New York appear to have arrived by way of Europe.

Bottom line: It doesn’t get Donald Trump and other politicians off the hook for goofy statements and slow responses, but a global pandemic was likely unstoppable by Jan. 20.

It has been less than two weeks since New Zealand imposed a coronavirus lockdown so strict that swimming at the beach and hunting in bushland were banned

It took only 10 days for signs that the approach here — “elimination” rather than the “containment” goal of the United States and other Western countries — is working.

The number of new cases has fallen for two consecutive days, despite a huge increase in testing, with 54 confirmed or probable cases reported Tuesday. That means the number of people who have recovered, 65, exceeds the number of daily infections

Before the United States and other countries can return to business and life as usual, we will need some innovative new tools that help us detect, treat and prevent covid-19.

It begins with testing. We can’t defeat an enemy if we don’t know where it is. To reopen the economy, we need to be testing enough people that we can quickly detect emerging hotspots and intervene early.

having patients do the swab themselves produces results that are just as accurate. This self-swab approach is faster and safer, since regulators should be able to approve swabbing at home or in other locations rather than having people risk additional contact.

President Donald Trump says he strongly disagrees with Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp's plan to reopen part of that state's economy, especially by putting beauty salons and other establishments that require close personal contact back in business.

"It's just too soon," Trump said Wednesday at the daily White House news briefing on coronavirus when asked about Kemp's timetable. "The spas and the beauty parlors and the barber shops ... I love them but they can want a little bit longer, just a little bit, not much, because safety has to predominate."

"Our next measured step is driven by data and guided by state public health officials. We will continue with this approach to protect the lives -- and livelihoods -- of all Georgians. ... I am confident that business owners who decide to reopen will adhere to Minimum Basic Operations, which prioritize the health and well-being of employees and customers."

The vote will come seven weeks into Mr. Biden’s presidency, as the growing number of vaccine doses given to Americans offers hope that the country is on course to move beyond the worst of a pandemic that has killed more than half a million people in the United States.

Mr. McCarthy sought to equate the progressive policies in the bill with socialism, and said “House Democrats have abandoned any pretense of unity.”

The legislation establishes an aggressive effort by the new president to drive down poverty, as the measure offers substantial benefits for low-income Americans, including a sizable one-year expansion of the child tax credit.

Initial reports were tinged with worry that children might be just as susceptible as adults, fueling speculation that schools might need to pre-emptively close to limit the variant’s spread.

Based on detailed contact-tracing of about 20,000 people infected with the new variant — including nearly 3,000 children under 10 — the report showed that young children were about half as likely as adults to transmit the variant to others.

The report estimated that the new variant is about 30 percent to 50 percent more contagious than its predecessors — less than the 70 percent researchers had initially estimated, but high enough that the variant is expected to pummel the United States and other countries, as it did Britain.

Now that coronavirus vaccines are starting to roll out in the US and abroad, many people may be dreaming of the day when they can travel, shop and go to the movies again. But in order to do those activities, you may eventually need something in addition to the vaccine: a vaccine passport application.

Several companies and technology groups have begun developing smartphone apps or systems for individuals to upload details of their Covid-19 tests and vaccinations, creating digital credentials that could be shown in order to enter concert venues, stadiums, movie theaters, offices, or even countries.

The CommonPass app created by the group allows users to upload medical data such as a Covid-19 test result or, eventually, a proof of vaccination by a hospital or medical professional, generating a health certificate or pass in the form of a QR code that can be shown to authorities without revealing sensitive information. For travel, the app lists health pass requirements at the points of departure and arrival based on your itinerary.

Because the state and city had reopened restaurants, Josh, who asked to be identified only by his first name to protect his privacy, assumed that local health officials had figured out a patchwork of precautions that would make indoor dining safe.

They were listening to the people they were told to listen to—New York Governor Andrew Cuomo recently released a book about how to control the pandemic—and following all the rules.

Josh was irritated, but not because of me. If indoor dining couldn’t be made safe, he wondered, why were people being encouraged to do it? Why were temperature checks being required if they actually weren’t useful? Why make rules that don’t keep people safe?

Spaniards patiently accepted the toughest confinement in Europe during the first wave of the virus in March, enduring serious economic losses in exchange for protecting the lives of their elders and the most vulnerable. We have been among the most disciplined in adhering to regulations like wearing masks, which are used by more than 84 percent of the population.

Before this second wave, there was plenty of time to put in place measures that have shown their effectiveness in Asian countries and have lessened the impact of the pandemic in closer ones, such as Portugal. But our politicians decided to ignore them: Health care systems were not fortified, plans were not made for the reopening of schools, and the tracking system recommended by all the experts was not put into place.

One of the keys to slowing the spread of the virus is to perform polymerase chain reaction testing on as many people as possible who have been in contact with infected people. But the average number of potential cases that Spain manages to trace is lower than Zambia (9.7 for every confirmed Covid-19 case), one-fourth that of Italy (37.5) and one-twentieth of Finland (185).

But history shows that past pandemics have reshaped societies in profound ways. Hundreds of millions of people have died. Empires have fallen. Governments have cracked. Generations have been annihilated. Here is a look at how pandemics have remade the world.

Many historians trace the fall of the Roman empire back to the Antonine Plague, which swept Rome during the reign of Marcus Aurelius. Nobody has ever nailed down the exact cause, but symptoms recorded by a physician named Galen — gruesome skin sores, high fever, diarrhea and sore throats — strongly suggest it was smallpox and measles.

Thought to be the world’s first episode of bubonic plague, its namesake was the Byzantine emperor who was in power when it hit, likely arriving in the form of infected fleas hitching rides across the world on the backs of rodents.

The official People’s Daily newspaper claimed in a Facebook post last week that “all available evidence suggests that the coronavirus did not start in central China’s Wuhan”

“Wuhan was where the coronavirus was first detected but it was not where it originated,” it quoted Zeng Guang, formerly a chief epidemiologist at the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, as saying

A foreign ministry spokesman, asked about state media reports that the virus originated outside China, said only that it was important to distinguish between where Covid-19 was first detected and where it crossed the species barrier to infect humans.

the United States is not a normal democracy. Untreated illness and uncertain care fill our politics with unnecessary fear and rage. Our president pushes this logic by offering insecurity instead of security as the aim of politics

This is not inefficiency or neglect. It is a pattern evident all across the Trump administration: Governing is not about problems to be solved, but emergencies to be magnified.

Health care is always political, but the politics can confirm or deny democratic norms and practices. A democratic country that handles a pandemic well generates trust in government, and even national pride. If care is not universal, then the political equation, especially during a pandemic, is entirely different.

Covid-19 cases are up around the country, even in places that had low rates over the summer. In response, many states have increased restrictions and emphasized the need to prevent transmission. People are not listening

Families continue to make Thanksgiving plans. Large gatherings are continuing despite the warnings. This is happening outside of the United States, as well. There’s a phrase for this: “pandemic fatigue.” People are tired of changing their behavior because of the coronavirus.

Stemming the spread of Covid-19 requires exactly this — a change in private behavior. The virus is being spread in informal settings like parties, sleepovers, dinners in people’s homes. The spread has accelerated in recent weeks, as colder weather has moved more social gatherings indoors.

Wang’s case, detailed by Henan’s health commission, has raised alarm because of the possibility she contracted the virus from Zhang, an asymptomatic or “silent” carrier. These are people who officials have repeatedly said pose a low risk of contagion and who are not reflected in the government’s published tally of confirmed cases.

On Wednesday, Zhang and two other doctors in Jia county in Pingdeshan tested positive for the virus but had no symptoms. All three had shared a meal together on 13 March after one of the group had been quarantined for 14 days as a precautionary measure after returning from Wuhan, the centre of the outbreak.

For the last two weeks, health authorities have reported an almost zero rate of local transmission of the virus, with almost all new cases coming in from outside the country. But critics say officials are downplaying the outbreak by not including asymptomatic cases.