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Find everyone they interact with by deploying contact tracing on a scale America has never attempted before.

focus restrictions more narrowly on the infected and their contacts so the rest of society doesn’t have to stay in permanent lockdown.

Instead, the president and his top advisers have fixated almost exclusively on plans to reopen the U.S. economy by the end of the month, though they haven’t detailed how they will do so without triggering another outbreak

Administration officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations, say the White House has made a deliberate political calculation that it will better serve Trump’s interest to put the onus on governors — rather than the federal government — to figure out how to move ahead.

without substantial federal funding, states’ efforts will only go so far

The next failure is already on its way, Frieden said, because “we’re not doing the things we need to be doing in April.”

In recent days, dozens of leading voices have coalesced around the test-trace-quarantine framework, including former FDA commissioners for the Trump and George W. Bush administrations, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and top experts at Johns Hopkins, Columbia and Harvard universities.

On Wednesday, former president Barack Obama weighed in, tweeting, “Social distancing bends the curve and relieves some pressure … But in order to shift off current policies, the key will be a robust system of testing and monitoring — something we have yet to put in place nationwide.”

And Friday, Apple and Google unveiled a joint effort on new tools that would use smartphones to aid in contact tracing.

What remains unclear is whether this emerging plan can succeed without the backing of the federal government.

“It’s mind-boggling, actually, the degree of disorganization,” said Tom Frieden, former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director. The federal government has already squandered February and March, he noted, committing “epic failures” on testing kits, ventilator supply, protective equipment for health workers and contradictory public health communication.

Experts and leaders in some states say remedying that weakness should be a priority and health departments should be rapidly shored up so that they are ready to act in coming weeks as infections nationwide begin to decrease

In America, testing — while still woefully behind — is ramping up. And households across the country have learned over the past month how to quarantine. But when it comes to the second pillar of the plan — the labor-intensive work of contact tracing — local health departments lack the necessary staff, money and training.

In South Korea, Taiwan, China and Singapore, variations on this basic strategy were implemented by their national governments, allowing them to keep the virus in check even as they reopened parts of their economy and society

In a report released Friday, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials — which represents state health departments — estimate 100,000 additional contact tracers are needed and call for $3.6 billion in emergency funding from Congress.

“We can’t afford to have multiple community outbreaks that can spiral up into sustained community transmission,” he said in the interview.

Unless states can aggressively trace and isolate the virus, experts say, there will be new outbreaks and another round of disruptive stay-at-home orders.

“All people are talking about right now is hospital beds, ventilators, testing, testing, testing. Yes, those are important, but they are all reactive. You are dealing with the symptoms and not the virus itself,”

The nonprofit Partners in Health quickly put together a plan to hire and train 1,000 contact tracers. Working from their homes making 20 to 30 calls a day, they could cover up to 20,000 contacts a day.

Testing on its own is useless, Nyenswah explained, because it only tells you who already has the virus. Similarly, tracing alone is useless if you don’t place those you find into quarantine. But when all three are implemented, the chain of transmission can be shattered.

Until a vaccine or treatment is developed, such nonpharmaceutical interventions are the only tools countries can rely on — besides locking down their cities.

to expand that in a country as large as the United States will require a massive dose of money, leadership and political will.

“You cannot have leaders contradicting each other every day. You cannot have states waiting on the federal government to act, and government telling the states to figure it out on their own,” he said. “You need a plan.”

When Vermont’s first coronavirus case was detected last month, it took two state health workers a day to track down 13 people who came into contact with that single patient. They put them under quarantine and started monitoring for symptoms. No one else became sick.

He did the math: If each of those 30 patients had contact with even three people, that meant 90 people his crew would have to locate and get into quarantine. In other words, impossible.

Since 2008, city and county health agencies have lost almost a quarter of their overall workforce. Decades of budget cuts have left the them unable to mount such a response. State health departments have recently had to lay off thousands more — an unintended consequence of federal officials delaying tax filings until July without warning states.

In Wuhan, a city of 11 million, the Chinese had 9,000 health workers doing contact tracing, said Frieden, the former CDC director. He estimates authorities would need roughly one contact tracer for every four cases in the United States.

“In the second wave, we have to have testing, a resource base, and a contact-tracing base that is so much more scaled up than right now,” he said. “It’s an enormous challenge.”

Gov. Charlie Baker (R) partnered with an international nonprofit group based in Boston

“You will never beat a virus like this one unless you get ahead of it. America must not just flatten the curve but get ahead of the curve.”

The group is paying new hires roughly the same salary as census takers, more than $20 an hour. As of Tuesday — just four days after the initial announcement — the group had received 7,000 applicants and hired 150.

“There’s a huge untapped resource of people in America if we would just ask.”

“There needs to be a crash course in contact tracing because a lot of the health departments where this is going to need to happen are already kind of flat-out just trying to respond to the crisis at hand,”

Experts have proposed transforming the Peace Corps — which suspended global operations last month and recalled 7,000 volunteers to America — into a national response corps that could perform many tasks, including contact tracing.

On Wednesday, the editor in chief of JAMA, a leading medical journal, proposed suspending the first year of training for America’s 20,000 incoming medical students and deploying them as a medical corps to support the “test, trace, track, and quarantine strategy.”

The national organization for local STD programs says $200 million could add roughly 1,850 specialists, more than doubling that current workforce.

Technology could also turn out to be pivotal. But the invasive nature of cellphone tracking and apps raises concerns about civil liberties.

Such technology could take over some of what contact tracers do in interviews: build a contact history for each confirmed patient and find those possibly exposed. Doing that digitally could speed up the process — critical in containing an outbreak — and less laborious.

In China, authorities combined the nation’s vast surveillance apparatus with apps and cellphone data to track people’s movements. If someone they came across is later confirmed as infected, an app alerts them to stay at home.

In the United States, about 20 technology companies are trying to create a contact tracing app using geolocation data or Bluetooth pings on cellphones

Early testing, detection, preventionNews that China had reported its first case of the coronavirus was enough reason for South Korean leaders and medical staff to brace themselves for the worst.

Acting fast was the most important decision South Korea made,"

Active collaboration among central and regional government officials and medical staff took place before cases began piling up, enabling South Korea's current testing capacity of 20,000 people a day at 633 sites, including drive-thru centers and even phone booths.

By early February, the first test had been approved

"Among Shincheonji members, there were many 20- and 30-year-olds who were infected. Many of them may have never even known they were carrying the virus and recovered easily while silently infecting those around them," Hwang said. "Early testing is why Korea hasn't reached its breaking point yet.

Under South Korea's single-payer health care system, getting tested costs $134. But with a doctor's referral or for those who've made contact with an infected person, testing is free. Even undocumented foreigners are urged to get tested and won't face threats due to their status.

South Korean leaders have amped up efficiency for overwhelmed hospitals by digitally monitoring lower-risk patients under quarantine, as well as keeping close tabs on visiting travelers who are required to enter their symptoms into an app.

Sites like Corona Map generate real-time updates about where current patients are located and inform proactive Koreans focused on protecting themselves.

That people are willing to forgo privacy rights and allow the publication of sensitive information underlines the willingness to pay the digital cost of state surveillance in the name of public safety,

78.5 percent of respondents agreed that they would sacrifice the protection of their privacy rights to help prevent a national epidemic.

97.6 percent responded that they at least sometimes wear a mask when they are outside, 63.6 percent of whom said they always wear one.

"Wearing masks or self-monitoring alone isn't foolproof to people in Korea, but taking part in these practices as a group is believed to have an impact,"

"This says that your individual choices may not have immediate benefit to you as an individual but will benefit the herd — that it doesn't work unless everybody is in the game."

Despite its apparently swift recovery from the coronavirus, South Korea may only be entering the beginning stages of what experts suspect may be a long ride ahead

bout 80 percent of COVID-19 cases can be categorized as mass infections. A call center in southwestern Seoul was at the center of a local outbreak this month that generated more than 156 infections. About 90 cases were traced to a Zumba class.

local infection clusters are emerging every day in churches, hospitals and other mundane spaces."

outh Korea has already started new testing on all arrivals from Europe, according to local news reports, preparing for a "second wave" of imported clusters. Even those who test negative are required to self-quarantine for 14 days

It doesn’t require, for instance, quickly lifting quarantines based on outlying projections of low fatality rates, as some return-to-normalcy conservatives have been urging in the last week

Rational hope accepts that the situation is genuinely dark, but then it still looks around for signposts leading up and out. It recognizes that things are likely to get worse, but keeps itself alert to the contexts in which they seem to be getting better

three patterns where I’m finding optimism right now.

First, there is modest hope in data compiled by the smart-thermometer company Kinsa, which claims to be able to identify anomalous, unseasonal fever rates using data from its nationwide user base.

Kinsa’s data show a clear February-and-March anomaly across the U.S., especially in areas known to be affected by the coronavirus. But it also shows that anomaly diminishing as lockdowns and social distancing began

Washington State bent its curve after the initial surge and California’s case rate and death rate trends are a gentle incline — nothing like the New York area’s terrifying spike.

Second, there is hope in the differing course of the pandemic so far in Greater New York versus the Pacific Coast.

the sharp turn suggests that general infection curves can be changed quickly even during a pandemic, and that the policies of the last two weeks might be having a real epidemiological effect.

In the most optimistic case, the spike reflects New York’s unique density and heavy reliance on mass transit

maybe some of the divide reflects policy — the fact that West Coast leaders acted ever-so-slightly more swiftly and with more seriousness of purpose than the feckless Bill de Blasio in New York City.

it suggests that even if you initially fail to spot an outbreak, you can still hope to imitate South Korea rather than northern Italy.

the circumstantial evidence of Western versus Asian epidemic curves and the direct evidence of multiple studies suggest that masking works, and that its widespread adoption can change an epidemic’s course.

These three hopeful signs together hint at a path back toward quasi-normalcy. The current shutdown bends infection curves relatively quickly, outside a few major urban outbreaks. That policy response combines with America’s social-distancing sprawl and car culture and younger-than-Europe age profile to compensate for our initial incompetence and natural insubordination. And then the cheapest, lightest-weight means of slowing transmission becomes ubiquitous in U.S. cities by Memorial or Independence Day.

Motoring on through adversity seems, at this moment, like the macho thing to do. Social distancing is seen as cowardly and weak, rather than what it truly is, which is altruistic and courageous

we have Fox, whose relentless message is the same as that of Sept. 11: Go about your daily lives or the terrorists win. But pandemics aren’t terrorists. Go about your daily lives and the virus wins

Capital and Ideology, Thomas Piketty’s recent entry into the genre, places inequality as the ultimate driving force of politics, society, and religion

The Upswing proposes another, similar arc

this one is “a long arc of increasing solidarity and then increasing individualism” which “had implications for equality, for politics, for social capital, and for culture. It led to an increasingly zero-sum, tribal view of society, and, eventually, to Trumpism.”

The evidence justifying the thesis, intriguing as it is, is not nearly so strong.

The authors assign ultimate importance to the route from individualism to communitarianism and back again, called the “I-we-I” curve in their shorthand.

Was it possible for America to become a society of solidarity, a “we” society (as Putnam and Garrett term it), only because it was a Mad Men one, undergirded by the exclusion of blacks and women?

Many concurrent transformations, of course, could also have driven these trends

Putnam and Garrett nonetheless present a clear story. They propose that the communitarian ethos of the Progressive Era—of muckrakers like Ida B. Wells and Jacob Riis and social reformers like the suffragette Jane Addams and education evangelist John Dewey—is the generating impulse of the upswing. And the various traumas of the 1960s—assassinations, campus violence, the civil-rights struggle, urban riots, the Vietnamese debacle—are proposed as the instigators for the downswing.

Google’s ambition to digitize millions of books has yielded a database that the curious can use to check trends in English usage over decades with only a few keystrokes. Putnam and Garrett rely on this tool to track the rate of usage of “we” compared to “I”—and find that the resulting curve traces the familiar U-turn that recurs everywhere else in the book.

Similar accounts of increasing selfishness fossilized in Google Books data have been offered before, most notably by the psychologist Jean Twenge, but they do not seem to be taken that seriously by many linguists.

My brief experimentation also showed that writers also discuss “you” more than “I” these days. From these analogies, one could conclude the exact opposite: a resurrected communitarianism after all.

Other attempts at constructing a meta-narrative for American history, like the recent These Truths by Kemper professor of American history Jill Lepore, place at their center the crisis of race and the centuries-long inability of whites to accept blacks as equal.

What evidence is there that, in the midst of all of these bewildering changes, it was really “most fundamentally the self-centeredness” that accounted for present-day malaise?

the argument is that “America took its foot off the gas”—so the drive toward equality decelerated and stalled. “As that ‘we’ came apart, racial progress in many important realms came to a halt,” they claim

This is certainly true in some respects. But it does feel like a disservice to give the overriding impression that to be black in 2020 is only marginally better than it was in 197

In fact, there has been substantial convergence in life expectancy, high-school graduation rates, and voter turnout between black and white Americans, for example. And the notion that the communitarian ethos of the “we” society reinforces the drive toward equality for the disadvantaged is difficult to square with the continuous progress of women,

By reaching further back in time than most academics ever venture (because data are scant and require more care to interpret), he and Garrett are able to focus on a more positive period in which the United States was broadly improving, when children could expect almost surely to earn more than their parents, and Congress was not wrecked by partisanship. It cannot be wrong to yearn for a time when progress was palpable, when projects like the Great Society were being proposed and enacted. Even if we do not precisely know the reasons for the upswing all those years ago, one happened all the same.

The report’s conclusion: This is “the only viable strategy.”

There will probably be more than one curve.

If we’re lucky, the coming months will probably look less like a mountain and more like a string of bumpy hills, say epidemiologists

if authorities ease some measures in coming months or if we start letting them slip ourselves, that hill could easily turn right back into the exponential curve that has cratered Italy’s health system and that U.S. officials are desperately trying to avoid replicating

One reason she and others are alarmed: In China, the fatality rate in Wuhan, the raging epicenter, was 5.8 percent. But in all other areas of the country it was 0.7 percent — a signal that most deaths were driven by an overwhelmed health system.

Initially leery of alarming the public, they have increasingly compared this pandemic to the 1918 flu pandemic, the deadliest in modern history. It infected roughly a third of the world’s population and killed at least 50 million people, including at least 675,000 in the United States.Like the bumpy hills some foresee in coming months, the 1918 pandemic hit America in three waves — a mild one that spring, the deadliest wave in fall and a final one that winter.

The crisis brought out the best in Baltimoreans — with sewing circles churning out gauze masks and hospital bedding, and neighbors donating food and services. But it also brought out the worst — xenophobic conspiracy theories that nurses of “German extraction” were deliberately infecting people. African American patients were kept out of most hospitals under Jim Crow-era segregation.

“Pandemics aren’t just physical,” said Schoch-Spana. “They bring with them an almost shadow pandemic of psychological and societal injuries as well.”

Here is the plain fact: You cannot reconstruct the economy until COVID-19 is under control. Period. Full-stop.

There a number of milestones that need to be passed before we can seriously begin rebuilding the economy: (1) We need to have a clear epidemiological picture of the scope of infection and transmission rates. (2) The healthcare system needs to be in a place where it has the resources to manage the demand load. (3) We need to have the capacity to rapidly test (and immediately process) an hugely elastic number of people.

Once those tasks have been met, we can start to slowly rebuild. To attempt to "restart" the economy before they have been met will give us the worst of both worlds: An out-of-control pandemic plus a ravaged, non-functional economy.

imagine how the economy would function with large numbers of Americans hospitalized; with many others sick; with people afraid for the lives of their loved ones; with some large percentage of children pulled from school; with workers calling out sick for fear of infecting their workplaces; with international travel severely curtailed; with supply chain disruptions across the globe; with demand—especially international demand—decimated.

is 500-some deaths worrisome? I mean, sure, in the sense that every life is precious. But that number isn't what's really scary: What's scary is the curve and were that projects out to 8 days, or 16 days, or 32 days from now

To believe that you can have a robust—or even functional—economy with a pandemic raging in the background is a fantasy. And it's a dangerous fantasy, because acting on that belief will cause both more death and more economic pain.

As of this morning, we have only 46,481 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the U.S. and 593 deaths

the problem is not the number of cases. It's the rate of increase:

That puts us as 40,000 new cases per day in eight days' time, with a total addition of somewhere in the neighborhood of 180,000 news cases during that period.

Until the new case curve begins to flatten we can't have any sense of what the steady-state looks like.

I've been banging on about this for weeks now, but I want to hammer it again: Where we are today doesn't matter. 

If this is what your case distribution looks like, then you can safely assume that the virus has achieved break-out and is basically everywhere. The places without positive results are most likely just places where tests haven't been available yet.

Until you have control over these curves, any attempt to "restart" the economy will fail because the underlying economic problem—a global pandemic which has the United States in its grip

Even as nations from Britain to India declare nationwide economic lockdowns, President Trump said he “would love to have the country opened up, and just raring to go, by Easter,” less than three weeks away, a goal that top health professionals have called far too quick.

he expressed outrage about having to “close the country” to curb the spread of the coronavirus and indicated that his guidelines on business shutdowns and social distancing would soon be lifted.

“I gave it two weeks,” he said, adding, “We can socially distance ourselves and go to work.”

“We are honored to serve and put our lives on the front line to protect and save as many lives as possible,” the American Medical Association, American Hospital Association and American Nurses Association wrote in an open letter. “But we need your help.”

Mr. Trump fell back on his comparison of the coronavirus to the flu, saying that despite losing thousands of people to the flu, “We don’t turn the country off.”

States including California, Maryland, Illinois and Washington have declared stay-at-home or shutdown orders, but other states have been looking for directives from the Trump administration. And countries in Asia are beginning to see a resurgence of coronavirus after easing up on restrictions.

For governors and mayors who have been trying to educate people about the urgent need to stay home and maintain social distance, Mr. Trump’s recent statements suggesting that such measures may be going too far threatened to make their jobs more difficult.

Mr. Hogan, the chairman of the bipartisan National Governors Association, said that health officials suggest that the virus’s peak could be weeks or months away. “We’re just trying to take the best advice that we can from the scientists and all the experts, and making the decisions that we believe are necessary for our states,” he said.

Both Mr. Trump and Vice President Mike Pence said that a lockdown had never been under consideration for the United States.

But the president and vice president were resolute that they want the country reopened. Mr. Pence said the administration’s timeline for trying to get businesses restarted and workers out of their homes was shorter than the period that health experts have said would be necessary to flatten the curve.

“We’ll focus on our most vulnerable, but putting America back to work will also be a priority, in weeks not months,” Mr. Pence said.

Mr. Pence also said two malaria drugs, chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, had been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for off-label use treating patients with Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. The F.D.A. did not immediately confirm that assertion, but two administration health officials said it was not true.

India, the world’s second-most populous country, will order its 1.3 billion people to stay inside their homes for three weeks to try to curb the spread of the coronavirus, Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared on Tuesday.

Left unclear was how Indians would be able to get food and other needed supplies. Mr. Modi alluded vaguely to the government and civil society groups stepping in to help, but offered no details.

Mr. Modi also pledged to spend about $2 billion on medical supplies, isolation rooms, ventilators, intensive care units and training for medical personnel to combat the pandemic.

New York’s case count is doubling every three days, the governor says.

“We haven’t flattened the curve,” he said. “And the curve is actually increasing.” The governor, appearing in front of piles of medical supplies, spoke in a far more sober tone and delivered notably bleaker news than he has in previous days.The peak of infection in New York could come as soon as two to three weeks, far earlier than previously anticipated, Mr. Cuomo said, which would put even bigger strain on the health care system than officials had feared.

The governor said the state now projects that it may need as many as 140,000 hospital beds to house virus patients, up from the 110,000 projected a few days ago. As of now, only 53,000 are available. Up to 40,000 intensive-care beds could be needed. “Those are troubling and astronomical numbers,” he said.

In New York City alone, there have been around 15,000 cases.“Look at us today,” he warned the rest of the country. “Where we are today, you will be in four weeks or five weeks or six weeks. We are your future.”

Perhaps it was inevitable that New York City and surrounding suburbs would become the epicenter of the coronavirus epidemic in the United States. The population density, reliance on public transportation and constant influx of tourists — all would seem to make the metropolitan area a target.

But to stop the virus, scientists have to figure out which factors played a greater role than others. As it turns out, that is not so simple.

Perhaps the epidemic in New York had less to do with the virus than with discrete opportunities to spread: In so-called super-spreader events, one patient somehow manages to infect dozens, even scores of others. At one point, half the cases in Massachusetts were attributed to a single initial infection.

Government officials should mandate safety measures, but those regulations need to be more tailored than a total shutdown of “nonessential” companies. Businesses were doing a good job already: announcing sanitation, social distancing and other protocols to keep operations safe and reassure customers. Visit any airline’s website.

State and local governments need to work with businesses to figure out a satisfactory combination of personal distance, self-isolation, frequent testing, stricter rules for those who must interact with customers, cleaning protocols and so on. Each industry will likely be different

The massive cost of a shutdown justifies costly measures to avoid it.

For instance, send some of the rivers of federal cash to purchasing more beds, ventilators, test kits, masks and gowns. Even $100 billion is cheap compared with $1 trillion a month.

Government officials need to work with a scalpel, not a sledgehammer. Isolate old people and those with pre-existing health conditions, who are much more likely to end up needing emergency care, while letting the young and healthy get back to work, carefully

Retired people have income streams that aren’t as disrupted by the virus. They can stay home.

Follow the Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore models: extensive testing, contact tracing, detailed people tracking. But keep the economy open, subject to stringent safety rules.

Lock down hotspots, but not entire states.

That approach may be expensive and onerous, but it’s better than destroying Americans’ livelihoods. It is time to craft a much more detailed, thoughtful, and cost-efficient policy to deal with the coronavirus pandemic.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is adamant that New Zealand will complete four weeks of lockdown — two full 14-day incubation cycles — before letting up. She has, however, given the Easter Bunny special dispensation to work this weekend.

this heavily tourism-reliant country — it gets about 4 million international visitors a year, almost as many as its total population — did the previously unthinkable: It shut its borders to foreigners March 19.

Two days later, Ardern delivered a televised address from her office — the first time since 1982 that an Oval Office-style speech had been given — announcing a coronavirus response alert plan involving four stages, with a full lockdown being Level 4.

A group of influential leaders got on the phone with her the following day to urge moving to Level 4.

“It’s inevitable that we will have to shut down anyway, so we would rather it be sharp and short.”

On March 23, a Monday, Ar­dern delivered another statement and gave the country 48 hours to prepare for a Level 4 lockdown. “We currently have 102 cases,” she said. “But so did Italy once.”

with strict border control, restrictions could be gradually relaxed, and life inside New Zealand could return to almost normal.

From the earliest stages, Ar­dern and her team have spoken in simple language: Stay home. Don’t have contact with anyone outside your household “bubble.” Be kind. We’re all in this together.

there has been a sense of collective purpose. The police phone line for nonemergencies has been overwhelmed with people calling to “dob in,” as we say here, reporting others they think are breaching the rules.

The response has been notably apolitical. The center-right National Party has clearly made a decision not to criticize the government’s response — and in fact to help it.

After peaking at 89 on April 2, the daily number of new cases ticked down to 67 on Monday and 54 on Tuesday. The vast majority of cases can be linked to international travel, making contact tracing relatively easy, and many are consolidated into identifiable clusters.

The nascent slowdown reflected “a triumph of science and leadership,”

“Other countries have had a gradual ramp-up, but our approach is exactly the opposite,” he said. While other Western countries have tried to slow the disease and “flatten the curve,” New Zealand has tried to stamp it out entirely.

The government won’t be able to allow people free entry into New Zealand until the virus has stopped circulating globally or a vaccine has been developed

From that Wednesday night, everyone had to stay at home for four weeks unless they worked in an essential job, such as health care, or were going to the supermarket or exercising near their home.

Ardern has said her government is considering mandatory quarantine for New Zealanders returning to the country post-lockdown. “I really want a watertight system at our border,”

Crushing the curve isn’t easy, but it’s very possible. In fact, many other countries, from South Korea to New Zealand to, believe it or not, Greece have already done it.

Bringing the infection rate way down was a lot easier for countries that acted quickly to contain the coronavirus, while the rate was still low, rather than spending many weeks in denial.

even places with severe outbreaks can bring their numbers down if they stay the course. Consider New York City

Trump is a quitter. Faced with the need to actually do his job and do what it takes to crush the pandemic, he just gave up.

And this retreat from responsibility won’t just kill thousands. It might also turn the Covid slump into a depression.

Here’s how it would work:

it becomes clear that Covid-19 is spiraling out of control. People retreat back into their homes, whatever Trump and Republican governors may say.

So we’re back where we started in economic terms, and in worse shape than ever in epidemiological terms. As a result, the period of double-digit unemployment, which might have lasted only a few months, goes on and on.

In other words, Trump’s search for an easy way out, his lack of patience for the hard work of containing a pandemic, may be precisely what turns a severe but temporary slump into a full-blown depression.

“If you’re doing that on top of relaxed restrictions, then you have the recipe for transmission.”

states experiencing the hottest weather in recent weeks—Arizona, Florida, Texas and Louisiana—have seen the biggest increase in cases.

even this chart may understate the effects of copyright, since the comparison assumes that the same quantity of books has been published every decade. This is of course not the case: Increasing literacy coupled with technological efficiencies mean that far more titles are publishe

By this calculation, the effect of copyright appears extreme. Heald says that the WorldCat research showed, for example, that there were eight times as many books published in the 1980s as in the 1880s, but there are roughly as many titles available on Amazon for the two decades.

Copyright advocates have long (and successfully) argued that keeping books copyrighted assures that owners can make a profit off their intellectual property, and that that profit incentive will "assure [the books'] availability and adequate distribution." The evidence, it appears, says otherwise.

What's the theory behind technology? Do we just deal with each one, one by one, or was there a kind of a framework to understand and have a perspective on technology?

All these technologies that we have now made are interrelated, they are codependent, and they form a kind of an ecosystem of technologies. You might even think of it as if these were species, as if it was a super-organism of technology.

I'm interested in this super-organism of all the technologies. I gave it a name. I call it the Technium.

In the larger sense, the Technium is anything that we make with our minds.

all these things are connected together and they form an interacting whole, a kind of a super-organism, that has in many ways its own slight bit of autonomy, and its own agenda.

It wants in the way that a plant wants light and so it will lean towards the light. It has an urgency to go towards light. It's not intelligent, it's not aware of it, but that's what it wants.

If it does want things, it means that it wants it independent of our choosing. At the same time we are making it; it is there because we exist. It's not independent of us, but it has some slight bit of autonomy.

Biologists are slowly coming around to admitting that there are directions in evolution. The standard orthodoxy for many years was that it was completely random, and that there was no direction whatsoever. Any ordinary person found that shocking because they could definitely see a direction in evolution.

We see an arc of increasing complexity in the long journey of life.

Along the long history there is movement towards increasing diversity.

There is also increasing movement towards specialization.

There is a trend towards increasing structure. Things become more and more complicated.

There is a trend towards emergence

There are other trends—towards ubiquity, towards energy efficiency, towards degrees of freedom.

What I'm suggesting is that there is a continuum, a connection back all the way to the Big Bang with these self-organizing systems that make the galaxies, stars, and life, and now is producing technology in the same way.

The energies flowing through these things are, interestingly, becoming more and more dense.

The amount of energy running through a sunflower, per gram per second of the livelihood, is actually greater than in the sun.

The most energy-dense thing that we know about in the entire universe is the computer chip in your computer. It is sending more energy per gram per second through that than anything we know.

The other thing that is evolving over time is the evolvability of the system. One of the things that life is doing is it's evolving its ability to evolve.

Another way to think about this is that one of the things that life likes to do is make eyeballs. Life evolution independently invented eyeballs 30 different times in different genres and taxonomies. It invented flapping wings four times. It invented venomous stings about 20 times independently, from bees, to snakes, to jellyfish. It also has invented minds many, many times.

We are going to fill the universe with all different kinds of thinkings, because only by having many different kinds of minds can we actually understand the universe. Our own mind is probably insufficient to completely comprehend the universe.

The reason why we want to embrace it with our full arms is because what technology brings us is an opportunity for everybody's special mix of talents to be expressed. Just as we all have different faces, we all have a different mix of aptitudes and abilities. We use technologies to express those things.

The question is: Was Moore's Law inevitable? What drives Moore's Law? Where is this coming from?

Moore's Law, not in terms of transistors, but in terms of measuring computer power, was happening long before Moore or anybody even noticed it. The effect was happening before anybody believed it.

this suggests is that this is actually an inherent attribute of the physics, and it suggests that it is independent of the economy. Even if the silicon chip had been invented in Stalinist Russia under a command economy, it probably would still follow exactly the same kind of curve.

Geoffrey West at the Santa Fe Institute looked at a whole bunch of technologies, like solar and batteries and other kinds of things, and they show this this scaling law holds true in many industries.

It has something to do with the basic shape of the economy and of physics, and it's not really a self-fulfilling prophecy. In this way I suggest that these kinds of curves are inevitable. One of the characteristics of the Technium is it exhibits these scaling laws.

we do know that the media that we have does rewire our brains. We know this by studies of people who are literate. They took scans in Peru of people who were illiterate and those who could read and write. They found that in fact their brains work differently—not just when they're reading, but just in general. After having five, ten or twenty years of education and learning to read and write, it actually changes how your brain works.

It's also very clear that if you are spending five or ten hours a day in front of a computer, that is going to change how your brain works. It is going to rewire how we're doing things.

We have a dependency on the alphabet. That's how we think about things. We need reading and writing. We think in terms of words. We imagine it. We see it around us. It's ubiquitous. We are dependent on the alphabet. That doesn't seem to bother us very much.

As these technologies become more ubiquitous and as we become dependent upon it, that's what it is. We will be dependent upon it. It will be our exobrain. We'll use it to remember. It will always be around.

We invented the external stomach, it's called cooking, that allows us to digest stuff that could not otherwise increase nutrition. It changed our jaw and our teeth. We are physically different people because of our inventions. While we can live on a raw diet, it's actually very hard to breed on a raw diet.

What we have done is become dependent on our technology, and we will become ever more so. That's just the definition of who we are. We are the first domesticated animals. We are a technology ourselves.

What I'm saying is that there is only a little more good in technology than bad, but a little is all we need. If we create one-tenth of a percent more than we destroy every year, we can make civilization, because that tenth of a percent compounded over centuries is all that we need.

Every time there's a new technology that comes along, we have the possibility to use it for harm or for good. We also suddenly have a new possibility and choice that we didn't have before. That new choice is that little tiny tenth of a percent that's better, because we have now another freedom that we didn't have before. That tips it into the good side. It's not much better, but that's all we need over the long term. That's why over the long term it's good, because it increases choices and possibilities.

Technology is not powerful unless it can be powerfully abused. There is going to be a learning period. There are going to be phases that people go through and then become addicted. They don't know how to use it.

DDT is horrible. Don't give it a job as a pesticide, and spray millions of acres of cotton fields. That's a terrible job and causes all kinds of havoc. Yet used locally and sprayed around households, DDT eliminates malaria and saves millions of lives a year, and it has very little environmental impact that way. That's a better job for this technology.

We want to find the right jobs for these things and the right frame. Just like there are no bad children, there are also no bad technologies. You've just got to find the right place for them.

My research has shown that there are very few species of technology that ever go extinct. That's the difference between biological evolution and technological evolution; in technology things don't go extinct. They can be resurrected.

Very few people go backwards. Why? Because we have to surrender so many choices and options.

As wholesome and as satisfying as those lives are, the price of going back to these places is surrendering choices and opportunities. In general, the whole arc of evolution is towards expanding those, and that's why by embracing technology we can align ourselves with this long arc throughout the cosmos into the future.

I did a calculation that showed three-quarters of the total energy that we use on the planet right now, at least in the United States, is used in servicing technology. Roughly, three-quarters of the gasoline that you use in your car is used to move the car and not you. You're just a minor passenger in this whole thing. We have energy used to heat the warehouses that are holding the stuff that we have or to move the stuff that we have. Already this Technium is consuming three-quarters of our energy.

That is also where it's going. There will be more technology used to support more technology. Most of the traffic on the Internet is not people talking to each other; it's machines talking to other machines.

These predictions have enormous implications for the millennial generation now entering the workforce. They have never known a world not defined by Moore’s Law. But unlike their generational predecessors, to this new cohort social networks and iPhone apps are old hat.

What obsesses them is hardware—drones, robots, 3-D printing—that is even more closely connected to the fortunes of Moore’s Law. Their careers will rise and fall on how well they ride the curve of an equation devised during the Johnson administration

And what a curve it will be. Moore’s Law is creative destruction on steroids. It regularly fosters the next wave of entrepreneurial opportunities made possible by the latest jump in chip performance. It can be blamed for much of the 90% mortality rate of electronics startups.

The great turning took place a decade ago, while we were all distracted by social networking, smartphones and the emerging banking crisis. Its breathtaking climb since tells us that everything of the previous 40 years—that is, the multi-trillion-dollar revolution in semiconductors, computers, communications and the Internet—was likely nothing but a prelude, a warm-up, for what is to come. It will be upon this wall that millennials will climb their careers against almost-unimaginably quick, complex and ever-changing competition.

Crowd-sharing, crowdfunding, bitcoin, micro-venture funding, cloud computing, Big Data—all have been early attempts, of varying success, to cope with the next phase of Moore’s Law. Expect many more to come. Meanwhile, as always, this new pace will become the metronome of the larger culture.

Rigid command-and-control structures in every walk of life, from corporations to governments to education, become vulnerable to competition by adaptive and short-lived alliances and confederacies. Now that process is going to attack every corner of society.

Even the human brain will be challenged by artificial intelligence—the latter enjoying the advantage of continuously improving at the pace of Moore’s Law.

Millennials face one of the greatest opportunities any generation has ever known: to completely remake the world through boundless digital technology.

The good news is that this generation seems to be already, often unconsciously, preparing for this adventure—through robotics competitions, gatherings of tech enthusiasts, engineers and tinkerers at Maker Faires and other do-it-yourself events, and playing with new applications for their drones and 3D printers. Having lived their entire lives at the pace of Moore’s Law, they seem to sense that the time has come to hit the accelerator. If millennials don’t entirely get it yet, they soon will.

Obama’s former defense secretary let loose on a White House that micromanaged the Pentagon while

contends that the refusal to enforce the chemical weapon red line in Syria “hurt the credibility of the president’s word”

his might be dismissed as sour grapes from a Republican who believes that the White House was eventually out to “destroy” him

“I think when we stepped out of Iraq, in many ways, we created this vacuum in which not a lot of attention was paid to what was happening in Iraq,

In one way or another, many of these criticisms concern Syria.

When the decision was made in 2010 to surge the number of American troops in Afghanistan,

by far the most centralized and controlling in national security of any I had seen since Richard Nixon.”

secretary of state, secretary of defense, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, director of the CIA

Obama rejected both. The administration was “consistently behind the curve,

These events have produced more than 250,000 Syrian dead, including more than 10,000 children;

United States as an unreliable strategic partner; and allowed Iran and Russia to make a play for greater regional influence.

“The failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad,”

United States with essential intelligence and given the “credible opposition”

The rise of the Islamic State, in other words, is a catastrophic result of negligence in Syria.

They only judge him dramatically wrong on the largest strategic and humanitarian issue of our time.

The yield curve hasn’t yet inverted, but the New York Fed’s model based on yields puts the probability of a recession in the next 12 months at 15%. That is the highest since the last recession and the same as in the summer of 2006, about 18 months before the recession began.

On the resource side, oil is a natural place to look for shortages that might constrict the economy and end a boom

If we knew the cycle would end soon, investing would be easy: Dump stocks for bonds. But the final phase can sometimes last for years, during which rising yields hit bond prices while stocks typically do very well.

Financial crises are worse, and we shouldn’t forget Lehman. But when the end of the economic cycle comes, investors should expect big losses even if banks don’t totter

Ten days ago, D.O.C.C.S. closed all its prisons to visitors—with the exception of non-contact legal visits—and issued each prisoner five postage stamps, two electronic messages, and one free phone call per week.

It’s nearly impossible to provide infection control in these settings,”

“If you wanted to set up a situation that would promote rapid transmission of a respiratory virus, you would say prison: it’s close quarters, unsanitary, individuals in frequent contact.”

“All programs have been cancelled except the Soap Shop,”

Earlier this month, about a week after New York reported its first case of COVID-19, and when stores were beginning to run out of toilet paper and hand sanitizer, Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that incarcerated workers had begun producing a state-branded hand sanitizer, called NYS Clean.

The soap shop is part of Corcraft, a state entity that pays workers between sixteen and sixty-five cents per hour,

When I asked D.O.C.C.S. about preparations for the coronavirus, a spokesperson told me that every facility has an emergency control plan, and that state prisons were used to dealing with infectious diseases,

On Friday, I summarized my reporting for Gregg Gonsalves, the epidemiologist, and asked him whether he considered the prison system’s preparations sufficient. “You have a gaping wound and you’re giving a Band-Aid,” he replied. Although the U.S. as a whole may be able to flatten the curve of the outbreak through social distancing, Gonsalves said, he expected to see in prisons, jails, and immigration detention centers a largely “uncontrolled, unflattened curve,”

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.”