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the inauguration platform they had been diligently assembling was wrecked: sound systems and photo equipment irreparably damaged or stolen, two lanterns designed and built by the eminent landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted in the late 19th century ripped from the ground, and blue paint tracked all over the stone balustrades and into the hallways.

“At this rate, counseling and consultation services in 2021 would increase by 65 percent over 2020 and by 200 percent as compared to more typical recent years,”

Since the siege, congressional aides have reported trouble sleeping and feeling anxious, claustrophobic, angry and depressed. Lawmakers have requested additional resources to support the mental health needs of employees in response to surging demand.

I’d been talking with DiAngelo for a year when Floyd was killed, and with other antiracism teachers for almost as long. Demand has recently spiked throughout the field, though the clamor had already been building, particularly since the election of Donald Trump

As their teaching becomes more and more widespread, antiracism educators are shaping the language that gets spoken — and the lessons being learned — about race in America.

“I will not coddle your comfort,” she went on. She gestured crisply with her hands. “I’m going to name and admit to things white people rarely name and admit.” Scattered Black listeners called out encouragement. Then she specified the predominant demographic in the packed house: white progressives. “I know you. Oh, white progressives are my specialty. Because I am a white progressive.” She paced tightly on the stage. “And I have a racist worldview.”

“White supremacy — yes, it includes extremists or neo-Nazis, but it is also a highly descriptive sociological term for the society we live in, a society in which white people are elevated as the ideal for humanity, and everyone else is a deficient version.” And Black people, she said, are cast as the most deficient. “There is something profoundly anti-Black in this culture.”

But was I being fragile? Was I being defensive or just trying to share something more personal, intimate and complex than DiAngelo’s all-encompassing sociological perspective? She taught, throughout the afternoon, that the impulse to individualize is in itself a white trait, a way to play down the societal racism all white people have thoroughly absorbed.

At some point after our answers, DiAngelo poked fun at the myriad ways that white people “credential” themselves as not-racist. I winced. I hadn’t meant to imply that I was anywhere close to free of racism, yet was I “credentialing”?

the pattern she first termed “white fragility” in an academic article in 2011: the propensity of white people to fend off suggestions of racism, whether by absurd denials (“I don’t see color”) or by overly emotional displays of defensiveness or solidarity (DiAngelo’s book has a chapter titled “White Women’s Tears” and subtitled “But you are my sister, and I share your pain!”) or by varieties of the personal history I’d provided.

White fragility, in DiAngelo’s formulation, is far from weakness. It is “weaponized.” Its evasions are actually a liberal white arsenal, a means of protecting a frail moral ego, defending a righteous self-image and, ultimately, perpetuating racial hierarchies, because what goes unexamined will never be upended

One “unnamed logic of Whiteness,” she wrote with her frequent co-author, the education professor Ozlem Sensoy, in a 2017 paper published in The Harvard Educational Review, “is the presumed neutrality of White European Enlightenment epistemology.”

she returned to white supremacy and how she had been imbued with it since birth. “When my mother was pregnant with me, who delivered me in the hospital — who owned the hospital? And who came in that night and mopped the floor?” She paused so we could picture the complexions of those people. Systemic racism, she announced, is “embedded in our cultural definitions of what is normal, what is correct, what is professionalism, what is intelligence, what is beautiful, what is valuable.”

“I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was ‘meant’ to remain oblivious,” one of the discipline’s influential thinkers, Peggy McIntosh, a researcher at the Wellesley Centers for Women, has written. “White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, assurances, tools, maps, guides, codebooks, passports, visas, clothes, compass, emergency gear and blank checks.”

Borrowing from feminist scholarship and critical race theory, whiteness studies challenges the very nature of knowledge, asking whether what we define as scientific research and scholarly rigor, and what we venerate as objectivity, can be ways of excluding alternate perspectives and preserving white dominance

the Seattle Gilbert & Sullivan Society’s casting of white actors as Asians in a production of “The Mikado.” “That changed my life,” she said. The phrase “white fragility” went viral, and requests to speak started to soar; she expanded the article into a book and during the year preceding Covid-19 gave eight to 10 presentations a month, sometimes pro bono but mostly at up to $15,000 per event.

For almost everyone, she assumes, there is a mingling of motives, a wish for easy affirmation (“they can say they heard Robin DiAngelo speak”) and a measure of moral hunger.

Moore drew all eyes back to him and pronounced, “The cause of racial disparities is racism. If I show you data that’s about race, we need to be talking about racism. Don’t get caught up in detours.” He wasn’t referring to racism’s legacy. He meant that current systemic racism is the explanation for devastating differences in learning, that the prevailing white culture will not permit Black kids to succeed in school.

The theme of what white culture does not allow, of white society’s not only supreme but also almost-absolute power, is common to today’s antiracism teaching and runs throughout Singleton’s and DiAngelo’s programs

unning slightly beneath or openly on the surface of DiAngelo’s and Singleton’s teaching is a set of related ideas about the essence and elements of white culture

if we were white and happened to be sitting beside someone of color, we were forbidden to ask the person of color to speak first. It might be good policy, mostly, for white people to do more listening than talking, but, she said with knowing humor, it could also be a subtle way to avoid blunders, maintain a mask of sensitivity and stay comfortable. She wanted the white audience members to feel as uncomfortable as possible.

For DiAngelo, the elements include the “ideology of individualism,” which insists that meritocracy is mostly real, that hard work and talent will be justly rewarded. White culture, for her, is all about habits of oppressive thought that are taken for granted and rarely perceived, let alone questioned

The modern university, it says, “with its ‘experts’ and its privileging of particular forms of knowledge over others (e.g., written over oral, history over memory, rationalism over wisdom)” has “validated and elevated positivistic, White Eurocentric knowledge over non-White, Indigenous and non-European knowledges.”

the idea of a society rigged at its intellectual core underpins her lessons.

There is the myth of meritocracy. And valuing “written communication over other forms,” he told me, is “a hallmark of whiteness,” which leads to the denigration of Black children in school. Another “hallmark” is “scientific, linear thinking. Cause and effect.” He said, “There’s this whole group of people who are named the scientists. That’s where you get into this whole idea that if it’s not codified in scientific thought that it can’t be valid.”

“This is a good way of dismissing people. And this,” he continued, shifting forward thousands of years, “is one of the challenges in the diversity-equity-inclusion space; folks keep asking for data. How do you quantify, in a way that is scientific — numbers and that kind of thing — what people feel when they’re feeling marginalized?”

Moore directed us to a page in our training booklets: a list of white values. Along with “ ‘The King’s English’ rules,” “objective, rational, linear thinking” and “quantitative emphasis,” there was “work before play,” “plan for future” and “adherence to rigid time schedules.”

They’ve just refined their analysis, with the help of two Princeton researchers, Chelsey Clark and Roni Porat. “As the study quality goes up,” Paluck told me, “the effect size dwindles.”

Dobbin’s research shows that the numbers of women or people of color in management do not increase with most anti-bias education. “There just isn’t much evidence that you can do anything to change either explicit or implicit bias in a half-day session,” Dobbin warns. “Stereotypes are too ingrained.”

he noted that new research that he’s revising for publication suggests that anti-bias training can backfire, with adverse effects especially on Black people, perhaps, he speculated, because training, whether consciously or subconsciously, “activates stereotypes.”

When we spoke again in June, he emphasized an additional finding from his data: the likelihood of backlash “if people feel that they’re being forced to go to diversity training to conform with social norms or laws.”

Donald Green, a professor of political science at Columbia, and Betsy Levy Paluck, a professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton, have analyzed almost 1,000 studies of programs to lessen prejudice, from racism to homophobia, in situations from workplaces to laboratory settings. “We currently do not know whether a wide range of programs and policies tend to work on average,

She replied that if a criterion “consistently and measurably leads to certain people” being excluded, then we have to “challenge” the criterion. “It’s the outcome,” she emphasized; the result indicated the racism.

Another critique has been aimed at DiAngelo, as her book sales have skyrocketed. From both sides of the political divide, she has been accused of peddling racial reductionism by branding all white people as supremacist

Chislett filed suit in October against Carranza and the department. At least five other high-level, white D.O.E. executives have filed similar suits or won settlements from the city over the past 14 months. The trainings lie at the heart of their claims.

Chislett eventually wound up demoted from the leadership of A.P. for All, and her suit argues that the trainings created a workplace filled with antiwhite distrust and discrimination

whatever the merits of Chislett’s lawsuit and the counteraccusations against her, she is also concerned about something larger. “It’s absurd,” she said about much of the training she’s been through. “The city has tens of millions invested in A.P. for All, so my team can give kids access to A.P. classes and help them prepare for A.P. exams that will help them get college degrees, and we’re all supposed to think that writing and data are white values? How do all these people not see how inconsistent this is?”

I talked with DiAngelo, Singleton, Amante-Jackson and Kendi about the possible problem. If the aim is to dismantle white supremacy, to redistribute power and influence, I asked them in various forms, do the messages of today’s antiracism training risk undermining the goal by depicting an overwhelmingly rigged society in which white people control nearly all the outcomes, by inculcating the idea that the traditional skills needed to succeed in school and in the upper levels of the workplace are somehow inherently white, by spreading the notion that teachers shouldn’t expect traditional skills as much from their Black students, by unwittingly teaching white people that Black people require allowances, warrant extraordinary empathy and can’t really shape their own destinies?

With DiAngelo, my worries led us to discuss her Harvard Educational Review paper, which cited “rationalism” as a white criterion for hiring, a white qualification that should be reconsidered

Shouldn’t we be hiring faculty, I asked her, who fully possess, prize and can impart strong reasoning skills to students, because students will need these abilities as a requirement for high-paying, high-status jobs?

I pulled us away from the metaphorical, giving the example of corporate law as a lucrative profession in which being hired depends on acute reasoning.

Moore expounded that white culture is obsessed with “mechanical time” — clock time — and punishes students for lateness. This, he said, is but one example of how whiteness undercuts Black kids. “The problems come when we say this way of being is the way to be.” In school and on into the working world, he lectured, tremendous harm is done by the pervasive rule that Black children and adults must “bend to whiteness, in substance, style and format.”

he said abruptly, “Capitalism is so bound up with racism. I avoid critiquing capitalism — I don’t need to give people reasons to dismiss me. But capitalism is dependent on inequality, on an underclass. If the model is profit over everything else, you’re not going to look at your policies to see what is most racially equitable.”

I was asking about whether her thinking is conducive to helping Black people displace white people on high rungs and achieve something much closer to equality in our badly flawed worl

it seemed that she, even as she gave workshops on the brutal hierarchies of here and now, was entertaining an alternate and even revolutionary reality. She talked about top law firms hiring for “resiliency and compassion.”

Singleton spoke along similar lines. I asked whether guiding administrators and teachers to put less value, in the classroom, on capacities like written communication and linear thinking might result in leaving Black kids less ready for college and competition in the labor market. “If you hold that white people are always going to be in charge of everything,” he said, “then that makes sense.”

He invoked, instead, a journey toward “a new world, a world, first and foremost, where we have elevated the consciousness, where we pay attention to the human being.” The new world, he continued, would be a place where we aren’t “armed to distrust, to be isolated, to hate,” a place where we “actually love.”

I reread “How to Be an Antiracist.” “Capitalism is essentially racist; racism is essentially capitalist,” he writes. “They were birthed together from the same unnatural causes, and they shall one day die together from unnatural causes.”

“I think Americans need to decide whether this is a multicultural nation or not,” he said. “If Americans decide that it is, what that means is we’re going to have multiple cultural standards and multiple perspectives. It creates a scenario in which we would have to have multiple understandings of what achievement is and what qualifications are. That is part of the problem. We haven’t decided, as a country, even among progressives and liberals, whether we desire a multicultural nation or a unicultural nation.”

Ron Ferguson, a Black economist, faculty member at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and director of Harvard’s Achievement Gap Initiative, is a political liberal who gets impatient with such thinking about conventional standards and qualifications

“The cost,” he told me in January, “is underemphasizing excellence and performance and the need to develop competitive prowess.” With a soft, rueful laugh, he said I wouldn’t find many economists sincerely taking part in the kind of workshops I was writing about

“When the same group of people keeps winning over and over again,” he added, summarizing the logic of the trainers, “it’s like the game must be rigged.” He didn’t reject a degree of rigging, but said, “I tend to go more quickly to the question of how can we get prepared better to just play the game.”

But, he suggested, “in this moment we’re at risk of giving short shrift to dealing with qualifications. You can try to be competitive by equipping yourself to run the race that’s already scheduled, or you can try to change the race. There may be some things about the race I’d like to change, but my priority is to get people prepared to run the race that’s already scheduled.”

DiAngelo hopes that her consciousness raising is at least having a ripple effect, contributing to a societal shift in norms. “You’re watching network TV, and they’re saying ‘systemic racism’ — that it’s in the lexicon is kind of incredible,” she said. So was the fact that “young people understand and use language like ‘white supremacy.’”

We need a culture where a person who resists speaking up against racism is uncomfortable, and right this moment it looks like we’re in that culture.”

Officials once boastful about their preparedness were frantically trying to secure protective gear and materials for tests, as death rates soared in Britain, France, Spain, Italy and Belgium.

Many European leaders felt so secure after the last pandemic — the 2009 swine flu — that they scaled back stockpiles of equipment and faulted medical experts for overreacting.

But that confidence would prove their undoing. Their pandemic plans were built on a litany of miscalculations and false assumptions

European leaders boasted of the superiority of their world-class health systems but had weakened them with a decade of cutbacks. When Covid-19 arrived, those systems were unable to test widely enough to see the peak coming — or to guarantee the safety of health care workers after it hit.

Accountability mechanisms proved toothless. Thousands of pages of national pandemic planning turned out to be little more than exercises in bureaucratic busy work

Officials in some countries barely consulted their plans; in other countries, leaders ignored warnings about how quickly a virus could spread.

Mathematical models used to predict pandemic spreads — and to shape government policy — fed a false sense of security.

National stockpiles of medical supplies were revealed to exist mostly on paper, consisting in large part of “just in time” contracts with manufacturers in China. European planners overlooked the risk that a pandemic, by its global nature, could disrupt those supply chains

Now South Korea, with a death toll below 300, is a paragon of success against the pandemic. Many epidemiologists there are dumbfounded at the mess made by their mentors.

Europe is grappling with how a continent considered among the most advanced failed so miserably.

Dr. Whitty, 54, initially praised in British newspapers as the reassuring “geek-in-chief,” has declined to speak publicly about his role in those decisions. His friends say the government has set him up to take the blame.

Sir David King, a former British chief science officer, said, “The word ‘arrogance’ comes to mind, I am afraid.” He added: “What hubris.”

when swine flu emerged, British leaders again turned to Professor Ferguson and the large modeling department he had built at Imperial College. He projected that swine flu, in a reasonable worst case, could kill nearly 70,000.

But the modelers’ “reasonable worst case” was wildly off. Swine flu ended up killing fewer than 500 people in Britain, less than in a seasonal flu.

For Mr. Johnson, the swine flu episode reinforced instincts not to impose restrictions in the name of public health.

Some experts now say Europe learned the wrong lesson from the swine flu.

“It created some kind of complacency,” said Prof. Steven Van Gucht, a virologist involved in the Belgian response. “Oh, a pandemic again? We have a good health system. We can cope with this.”

It also coincided with Europe’s worst economic slump in decades. French legislators were furious at the cost of buying millions of doses of vaccines and faulted the government for needlessly stockpiling more than 1.7 billion protective masks.

The idea of a government warehousing medical supplies came to seem outdated,” said Francis Delattre, a French senator who raised alarms about dependence on China. “Our fate was put into the hands of a foreign dictatorship.”

“France has a superiority complex,” Mr. Delattre added, “especially when it comes to the health sector.”

“It’s pretty difficult to build a stockpile for something you’ve not seen before,” said Dr. Ben Killingley, an infectious disease expert who advises the government on what to stockpile. “It depends how much you want to spend on your insurance.”

National governments barred the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control from setting benchmarks or pointing out deficiencies. So the agency’s public remarks were almost unfailingly positive

“We couldn’t say, ‘You should have this,’” said Arthur Bosman, a former agency trainer. “The advice and the assessment had to be phrased in an observation.”

the European Union in 2016 solicited bids to build a continent-wide repository. But the initiative fizzled because Britain, France and other large countries thought they had the situation covered

European and global health officials had thoroughly reviewed Belgium’s pandemic plan over the years. But when Covid-19 hit, Belgian officials did not even consult it.

“It has never been used,” said Dr. Emmanuel André, who was drafted to help lead the country’s coronavirus response

“I don’t understand why we were not prepared,” said Dr. Matthieu Lafaurie, of the Saint-Louis hospital in Paris. “It was very surprising that every country had to realize itself what was going on, as if they didn’t have the examples of other countries.

He insisted that he had warned privately in early March that Britain’s insufficient testing meant the scientists did not have enough information to track the epidemic.Across Europe, he said, more testing “would have been the single thing which would have made the biggest difference.”

there is another lesson to learn, said Dr. André, who spent years fighting epidemics in Africa before advising Belgium on the coronavirus.“They keep on telling countries what they should do, very clearly. But all these experts, when it happens in your own countries? There’s nothing,” he said.“One lesson to learn is humility.”

The shortfall in testing isn’t just a problem for individual patients and their doctors. It is also holding back large-scale surveys of seemingly healthy populations, in workplaces and elsewhere, and scientific research into fundamental properties of the virus and the disease it causes.

there is an escalating need to test much larger groups repeatedly—to track the spread of the virus as restrictions ease—and to carry out population-based studies that will reveal more about how this virus behaves.

in determining whether an individual is safe to enter a workplace or school on a given morning. Ideally, for the later purposes, tests would be conducted swiftly and at high volume at the places where samples are taken

One such approach, still in development, would exploit the ability of the well-known bacterial gene-editing system known as CRISPR to recognize coronavirus RNA.

While the need for greatly expanded testing in the next phase of this pandemic is widely acknowledged, the United States has no coordinated plan for how to achieve it. The technical building blocks are in hand, but how to put them together is not yet clear. Moreover, major regulatory hurdles limit the use of the results from novel tests in patient care, especially in certain states such as New York. And the logistics of deploying enough personnel to track samples and deliver results are daunting. Because of the complexity and importance of such testing, a centralized program, run by a strong scientific leader and paid for with federal dollars, may be the only solution.

rmed with efficient and accurate tests to detect the virus (indicating active infection) and reliable tests to measure antibodies against it (implying prior exposure and possible immunity), public-health programs could paint an accurate picture of the current pandemic. Small and large businesses, schools, health-care facilities, and other organizations could track the outcomes of their attempts to restore normal activities, and scientists could answer key questions about viral transmission and host immunity.

decisive answers will come only from studying human beings who are exposed to the virus under real-life conditions. Such studies may be feasible only under circumstances in which natural transmission is occurring at significant rates, as it currently is. Therefore, if we are to get answers to the following questions, we must act now.

tudies to answer these questions require identifying enough people who have recovered, then testing them repeatedly for the appearance of a new infection. Such people are relatively easy to find. They include doctors and nurses in hospitals in hard-hit metropolitan areas such as New York City; staff and residents at nursing homes with high rates of infection; and crews of U.S. Navy ships that have experienced outbreaks of COVID-19.

identify asymptomatic infections. Following up on those cases will shed light on how many asymptomatic people ultimately develop symptoms; how long it takes for them to do so; whether asymptomatic people who ultimately develop symptoms have higher viral loads than those who don’t get sick; whether symptomatic and asymptomatic people have different immune responses; whether other, simpler procedures (such as tests for some chemical abnormality in the blood) might be used to screen for infection; and how large a contribution asymptomatic people make to the ongoing transmission of the virus.

Despite repeated warnings after prior epidemics about the likelihood of new ones caused by novel microbes, the United States and many other countries failed to respond efficiently to this one. Scientists might have detected the new coronavirus much earlier with the better tools for microbial surveillance that already exist; prevented the pathogen’s worldwide spread by more aggressive testing and contact tracing; and supported better and safer health care with larger stockpiles and pipelines for procurement of medical equipment. Humanity should never be this unprepared again.

In the United States, the great wartime mobilization of resources and manpower seemed to reflect what this unique nation was capable of achieving when set against a global, existential threat.

Of course, there’s a limit to these metaphors’ potency. In geopolitical terms, the Trump administration and nationalist governments elsewhere in the West are almost explicitly interested in breaking up the post-World War II political and economic order, not rallying it

“We might forgive our leaders’ frequent and self-serving language of war and their invocation of Churchill in 1940 if only it is accompanied by some of that wartime spirit that reset and expanded the boundaries of the possible,” wrote Oxford University historian Margaret MacMillan. “What had seemed fantastical or too expensive in peace — mass producing penicillin, splitting the atom, making jet engines — swiftly became reality.

But figures like Trump and Johnson, whose political parties presided over years of austerity or maintain an aversion to social spending, aren’t the sort of statesmen who would champion a New Deal or forge the National Health Service.

“Many of the actions undertaken to put the United States on a war footing in the 1940s were natural outgrowths of Franklin Roosevelt’s decade-long attempt to equip the federal government with new capabilities and grant it the necessary authorities to overcome the Great Depression,”

“The creation of new agencies and organizations was second nature to that generation, as was a willingness to experiment boldly, persistently, and swiftly on what might provide immediate relief for millions of affected Americans. Those habits have long since been forgotten.”

And maybe, as a virus paralyzes the globe, the lesson that matters is not one of leadership or courage or sacrifice, but something more tectonic and imperceptible.

“From the vantage point of the 21st century, if there is a historical grand narrative that does justice to the significance of the 1945 moment, it is not that of international organizations like the Bretton Woods institutions or national welfare states,” wrote Adam Tooze

It is, rather, “what 21st-century environmental historians call the ‘Great Acceleration,’ the vast and dramatic acceleration of humanity’s appropriation of nature that reached a turning point in the middle of the 20th century,”

“In its globe-spanning dimensions, in its multifaceted integration of the land, the sea, and the air, and in its violent intensity, World War II was an anticipation and driver of that process, which continues down to the present day.”

Huawei has long described the firm

Now, documents obtained by Reuters show how the Chinese tech titan effectively controlled Skycom.

One document described how Huawei scrambled in early 2013 to try to “separate” itself from Skycom out of concern over trade sanctions on Tehran.

Skycom Tech Co Ltd - as a separate local business partner in Iran.

The revelations in the new documents could buttress a high-profile criminal case being pursued by U.S. authorities against Huawei and its chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, who is also the daughter of Huawei’s founder.

The United States has been trying to get Meng extradited from Canada, where she was arrested in December 2018.

Huawei and Meng have denied the criminal charges, which include bank fraud, wire fraud and other allegations.

The newly obtained documents appear to undermine Huawei’s claims that Skycom was just a business partner.

Huawei declined to comment for this story.

Churchill set a frenetic pace for his whole government, showering his aides with “Action This Day” memos.

The second element of British resilience was intense social connection. People were forced together every night in tightly packed group or family shelters.

In national crises, a sort of social and psychological arms race takes place. The threat—whether bombings or a pandemic—ramps up fear, unpredictability, divisiveness, fatalism, and feelings of weakness and meaninglessness. Nations survive when they can ramp up countervailing emotions and mindsets

Third, laughter. Brits credit themselves, accurately, for being a comic people. During the war, every disaster was turned into an occasion for humor,

The fourth factor in British resilience was moral purpose. Friedrich Nietzsche once remarked that “he who has a why to live for can endure any how.” The Brits had a firm sense of the moral rightness of their cause, the unique evil Hitler represented, and the reason they had to endure all this

Finally, there was equality. During moments of threat and crisis, people are intensely sensitive to inequality, to the feeling that some people are being treated better than everybody else.

The pressure of the situation induced people to be frenetically social. Singers offered free concerts, which were packed. Larson reports that young women would set up dates for every night, planning weeks in advance, so as to never be alone

This happens when countries take actions, even if only symbolic ones, that make frightening situations feel more controllable and predictable. This happens when they foster social solidarity by paying extreme attention to fairness. This happens when they intensify social connection and create occasions for social bonding and shared work.

Societies that build resilience do not hide behind a wall of happy talk or try to minimize the danger.

Resilience is built when people confront a threat realistically, and discover that they have the resources to cope with it together.

Resilience is built when people tell a collective story about the danger that places the current terror they are facing within a larger redemptive context. When all this is over, we’ll be better because of it.

What was once a scary threat to be avoided, releasing a surge of destructive cortisol, becomes a challenge to be met, releasing a cascade of adrenaline.

Evolution equipped us to deal with short bursts of terror, such as getting chased by a lion, not to cope with long, unrelenting months of stress.

Isolation, fear, and stress send the autonomic nervous system into overdrive, and weaken the immune system. The social-distancing measures we are taking to avoid the coronavirus make us more susceptible to it when it comes.

in some ways, COVID-19 presents an even more dire challenge to us than the bombing did to Great Britain in 1940. A study by the Russell Sage Foundation found that what makes societies resilient during a crisis are high levels of faith in institutions, high social trust, high levels of patriotism and optimism, and high levels of social and racial integration. The United States that confronts the coronavirus pandemic has catastrophically low levels of all these things.

Worse, unlike the Blitz, this pandemic deprives us of the thing social resilience needs most—close physical and social connectio

In America, the pandemic finds a country that has already seen a recent tripling of the number of people suffering from depression, a sharp increase in mental-health issues of all varieties; a sharp rise in suicides, and record levels of tribal hostility and polarization. The dread and isolation that COVID-19 causes threaten to exacerbate all this, to drive people even farther apart.

Today, the world is threatened by a virus. The moral story we tell has to be less about the evil we face and more about the solidarity we are building with one another. The story we tell has to be about how we took this disease and turned it into an occasion to become a better society

Fandoms have trained themselves for years to understand how attention works on social media and how to funnel it to things they care about. They easily can reach millions of people in a day—albeit with slightly more complicated methods than a major pop group like BTS, which can speak to all of its 26 million followers at once—and they know it.

by 2018, young Harry Styles fans were exerting pressure from the bottom-up: They started bringing Black Lives Matter flags to his concerts and urging him on Twitter to recognize the cause

Now fans are moving beyond asking pop stars if they can borrow their influence. When they’re seeking attention for a cause, “the audience is no longer our stars, but ourselves,” Gross told me in an email. The pandemic has laid bare the limits of celebrities, she suggested

Fans still think celebrities have an obligation to support certain causes, but right now they’re more interested in seeing a mass movement come from the fandom itself. And they’re well equipped to create one. “Fandoms are dispersed, often digital, and already organized, all of which aid and support their using their platforms to shift the locus of attention,”

Today, in the case of COVID-19, “all states face the same essential threat, and each government’s response is a kind of laboratory experiment,” Tierney said.

“The United States had the advantage of being struck relatively late by the virus, and this gave [us] a priceless chance to copy best practices and avoid the mistakes of others,” he noted.

When China began confining millions of people to their homes in January, the U.S. government should have gotten the message that the Chinese were grappling with a grave threat to the wider world, the Yale sociologist and physician Nicholas Christakis told me in March.

We lost six weeks” in the United States to prepare—“to build ventilators, get protective equipment, organize our ICUs, get tests ready, prepare the public for what was going to happen so that our economy didn’t tank as badly. None of this was done adequately by our leaders.”

By one estimate, from the epidemiologists Britta L. Jewell and Nicholas P. Jewell, if social-distancing policies had been implemented just two weeks earlier in March, 90 percent of the cumulative coronavirus deaths in the United States during the first wave of the pandemic might have been prevented.

Rather than using diagnostic tests that the World Health Organization had distributed to other countries early in the global outbreak, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention insisted on developing its own, only to botch the rollout of those tests.

Even now, as a number of countries have swum feverishly toward safer ground, the United States has spent the past couple of months of near-nationwide lockdown merely treading water. It has yet to roll out robust testing across the country

Pandemics are, in fact, particularly ripe moments for cross-cultural learning

as a senator, Romney is urging the U.S. government to follow South Korea’s lead and “learn from those countries that were successful” in dealing with their outbreaks. Conservatives are championing Sweden’s laissez-faire approach as a blueprint for how to mitigate public-health damage while preserving freedom and the economy.

As an example of ideas the United States could borrow from other countries, Tierney cited the fact that 750,000 people in Britain, which would be equivalent to nearly 4 million Americans, responded to the British government’s request to enlist in a “volunteer army” to help deliver food to vulnerable populations and provide other assistance.

A number of countries that have had more success against the coronavirus have demonstrated greater open-mindedness about learning from their peers. Taiwanese officials are watching Iceland’s mass-testing efforts, while the German government is explicitly modeling its response after South Korea’s “trace, test, and treat” campaign.

“Things have moved so quickly that there hasn't been much time for considered lesson-drawing,” he noted. Some countries were slow to institute strict lockdowns, despite witnessing the horrifying spread of the virus in Italy, while others “embraced approaches that broke with the broader consensus,” including “Sweden’s proposal

New Zealand’s record of learning

His colleague at the University of Otago, Michael Baker, told me that as a government adviser on the nation’s coronavirus taskforce, he was personally very influenced by a February 2020 WHO-China Joint Mission report, which suggested that the pandemic could be contained, and led him to advocate for New Zealand’s current strategy of eliminating the virus entirely from the country.

Yet Wilson added that New Zealand has lagged behind Asian countries in encouraging mass mask wearing, in rigorously quarantining incoming travelers, and in using digital technologies for contact tracing

In the United States too, even before the virus hit, attitudes toward learning from other countries were beginning to change

“The No. 1 place to live out the American Dream right now is Denmark,” Pete Buttigieg stated during one debate.

Amid all this, Trump has exhibited more hubris than humility. The president has repeatedly claimed that the United States is leading the world in testing, which in part is an unflattering reflection of the U.S. outbreak’s huge scale and also is not true on a per-capita basis

with the exception of the U.S. Paycheck Protection Program, “most of our economic-policy response has ignored useful lessons from abroad, explaining why our unemployment rate is skyrocketing above those in many other affected countries.”

Kelemen noted that the coronavirus crisis has led to a surge in interest among the American public and U.S. policy makers in harvesting lessons from other countries, most evident in the fact that everyone is following “the comparative charts of how countries are doing over time on infection rates or changes in year-on-year death counts.

Calls for police divestment are a dominant theme of protesters’ policy demands. The radical idea is a product of how increased policing “has eaten up so much state and national resources at the expense of investment in black and brown communities,” says Vanita Gupta, the president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, who worked to overhaul departments in Cleveland, Baltimore, Chicago, and Ferguson, Missouri, as the former head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.  

At the federal level, protesters and civil-rights groups are urging Congress to pass, among other reforms, a national prohibition on chokeholds; the elimination of federal programs that offer military equipment to local law enforcement; the creation of a national public database of abusive police officers; and an end to qualified immunity, a doctrine that prevents police from being held liable in certain cases for breaking the law.

“Moments of passion pass and then you have to have people who are still at the table pushing.”

But the protests aren’t all about politics or policy goals, organizers and protesters told me. They’ve been an outlet for black Americans to express their hurt and fury that 400 years after the start of slavery, five decades after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, and six years after the police shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, black Americans are still two and a half times more likely to be killed by police than white people. They are dying of COVID-19 at three times the rate of white people. And they’re more likely than white Americans to have lost jobs in the economic catastrophe spawned by the pandemic

“I remember a movie called Network. I remember [the news anchor] going to the window and saying ‘I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!’” she told me. That’s how she says she felt when she saw the video of Floyd’s arrest.

The calamity we're now all living through offers the professional class an opportunity to reconsider assessments of the national condition issued so confidently pre-pandemic: Economists focus on material living standards partly for ease of quantification, but also because that is what free markets most reliably produce

But “material living standards,” measured in dollars of consumption (or inches of flat-screen TV), are not the same thing as “quality of life.” They say little about relationships, dignity, agency, or life satisfaction.

Ask yourself what matters to you right now. Consider whether new apps on your smartphone compensate for the loss of control, sense of powerlessness, and strain of unpredictability.

Speaking in March at the Heritage Foundation, Senator Pat Toomey, a Republican said, “many nuclear families are struggling, that families don’t have the community support that they once had, extended families live apart,” and “civil society” is in “decline.” Still, he argued, “the standard of living of middle-class and working class Americans has improved,” citing larger houses, better computers, and cars that are not only safer but also equipped with satellite radio and seat warmers.

Weighing these competing factors, he concluded, “For all the problems that we undoubtedly have, the fact is life is better today than it has ever been for the vast majority of the American people.”

By Senator Toomey’s and Dr. Strain’s standards, the past few months were the greatest in human history to be alive. The pandemic has allowed more time than ever to enjoy air-conditioning and color televisions, computers and phones. One can joy ride for hours streaming podcasts.

How much of that technology would you trade to erase the coronavirus? Put another way, how far back in history would you have to travel to find a time when Americans’ true quality of life was lower than today’s?

That this is even a question serves as damning refutation of Senator Toomey’s confidence that an improved standard of living more than compensates for weakened family bonds and waning community support.

While the right-of-center often dismisses working-class frustration with claims of economic prosperity, the left-of-center tends to dismiss their frustration as backward or racist.

America could slow, or partially reverse, elements of globalization that have most disrupted working-class lives, if that were our priority.

We could reorient our education system toward serving the majority of young people who still don’t earn even a community-college degree.

We could reform our system of organized labor to provide workers a genuine seat at the table and an institution in the community.

We could emphasize geography when we talk about diversity, aiming to distribute talent and investment more widely.

These are forms of social redistribution. The task is not to write a larger check but to relinquish power and realign institutions on behalf of those who have been left behind for decades.

Aviation is safe in large part because it learns from its disasters. Investigators from the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board go immediately to accident sites to begin assessing evidence. After months or even years of research, their detailed reports try to lay out the “accident chain” and explain what went wrong

with respect to the coronavirus pandemic, it has suffered by far the largest number of fatalities, about one-quarter of the global total, despite having less than one-20th of the world’s population.

What if the NTSB were brought in to look at the Trump administration’s handling of the pandemic? What would its investigation conclude?

This was a journey straight into a mountainside, with countless missed opportunities to turn away. A system was in place to save lives and contain disaster. The people in charge of the system could not be bothered to avoid the doomed course.

Timelines of aviation disasters typically start long before the passengers or even the flight crew knew anything was wrong, with problems in the design of the airplane, the procedures of the maintenance crew, the route, or the conditions into which the captain decided to fly. In the worst cases, those decisions doomed the flight even before it took off. My focus here is similarly on conditions and decisions that may have doomed the country even before the first COVID-19 death had been recorded on U.S. soil.

What happened once the disease began spreading in this country was a federal disaster in its own right: Katrina on a national scale, Chernobyl minus the radiation. It involved the failure to test; the failure to trace; the shortage of equipment; the dismissal of masks; the silencing or sidelining of professional scientists; the stream of conflicting, misleading, callous, and recklessly ignorant statements by those who did speak on the national government’s behalf

As late as February 26, Donald Trump notoriously said of the infection rate, “You have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down close to zero.” What happened after that—when those 15 cases became 15,000, and then more than 2 million, en route to a total no one can foretell—will be a central part of the history of our times.

1. The Flight Plan

the most important event was the H5N1 “bird flu” outbreak, in 2005. It originated in Asia and was mainly confined there, as the SARS outbreak had been two years earlier. Bush-administration officials viewed H5N1 as an extremely close call. “

Shortly before Barack Obama left office, his administration’s Pandemic Prediction and Forecasting Science and Technology Working Group—yes, that was a thing—released a report reflecting the progress that had been made in applying remote-sensing and AI tools since the early days of Global Argus. The report is freely available online and notes pointedly that recent technological advances “provide opportunities to mitigate large-scale outbreaks by predicting more accurately when and where outbreaks are likely to occur, and how they will progress.”

“Absolutely nothing that has happened has been a surprise. We saw it coming. Not only did we see it, we ran the models and the gaming exercises. We had every bit of the structure in place. We’ve been talking about a biohazard risk like this for years. Anyone who says we did not see this coming has their head in the sand, or is lying through their teeth.”

The system the government set up was designed to warn not about improbable “black swan” events but rather about what are sometimes called “gray rhinos.” These are the large, obvious dangers that will sooner or later emerge but whose exact timing is unknown.

other U.S. leaders had dealt with foreign cover-ups, including by China in the early stages of the SARS outbreak in 2002. Washington knew enough, soon enough, in this case to act while there still was time.

During the Obama administration, the U.S. had negotiated to have its observers stationed in many cities across China, through a program called Predict. But the Trump administration did not fill those positions, including in Wuhan. This meant that no one was on site to learn about, for instance, the unexplained closure on January 1 of the city’s main downtown Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, a so-called wet market

“It was in the briefings by the beginning of January,” a person involved in preparing the president’s briefing book told me. “On that there is no dispute.” This person went on: “But knowing it is in the briefing book is different from knowing whether the president saw it.” He didn’t need to spell out his point, which was: Of course this president did not.

To sum up: The weather forecast showed a dangerous storm ahead, and the warning came in plenty of time. At the start of January, the total number of people infected with the virus was probably less than 1,000. All or nearly all of them were in China. Not a single case or fatality had been reported in the United States.

2. The Air Traffic Controllers

In cases of disease outbreak, U.S. leadership and coordination of the international response was as well established and taken for granted as the role of air traffic controllers in directing flights through their sectors

in normal circumstances, its location in China would have been a plus. Whatever the ups and downs of political relations over the past two decades, Chinese and American scientists and public-health officials have worked together frequently, and positively, on health crises ranging from SARS during George W. Bush’s administration to the H1N1 and Ebola outbreaks during Barack Obama’s.

One U.S. official recalled the Predict program: “Getting Chinese agreement to American monitors throughout their territory—that was something.” But then the Trump administration zeroed out that program.

“We had cooperated with China on every public-health threat until now,” Susan Shirk, a former State Department official and longtime scholar of Chinese affairs at UC San Diego, told me. “SARS, AIDS, Ebola in Africa, H1N1—no matter what other disputes were going on in the relationship, we managed to carve out health, and work together quite professionally. So this case is just so anomalous and so tragic.” A significant comparison, she said, is the way the United States and the Soviet Union had worked together to eliminate smallpox around the world, despite their Cold War tensions. But now, she said, “people have definitely died because the U.S. and China have been unable to cooperate.”

What did the breakdown in U.S.-Chinese cooperation mean in practice? That the U.S. knew less than it would have otherwise, and knew it later; that its actions brought out the worst (rather than the merely bad) in China’s own approach to the disease, which was essentially to cover it up internally and stall in allowing international access to emerging data; that the Trump administration lost what leverage it might have had over Chinese President Xi Jinping and his officials; and that the chance to keep the disease within the confines of a single country was forever lost.

In addition to America’s destruction of its own advance-warning system, by removing CDC and Predict observers, the Trump administration’s bellicose tone toward China had an effect. Many U.S. officials stressed that a vicious cycle of blame and recrimination made public health an additional source of friction between the countries, rather than a sustained point of cooperation, as it had been for so many years.

“The state of the relationship meant that every U.S. request was met with distrust on the Chinese side, and every Chinese response was seen on the American side as one more attempt to cover up,”

Several officials who had experience with China suggested that other presidents might have called Xi Jinping with a quiet but tough message that would amount to: We both know you have a problem. Why don’t we work on it together, which will let you be the hero? Otherwise it will break out and become a problem for China and the whole world.

“It would have taken diplomatic pressure on the Chinese government to allow us to insert our people” into Wuhan and other disease centers, Klain said. “The question isn’t what leverage we had. The point is that we gave up leverage with China to get the trade deal done. That meant that we didn’t put leverage on China’s government. We took their explanations at face value.”

3. The Emergency Checklist

The president’s advance notice of the partial European ban almost certainly played an important part in bringing the infection to greater New York City. Because of the two-day “warning” Trump gave in his speech, every seat on every airplane from Europe to the U.S. over the next two days was filled. Airport and customs offices at the arrival airports in the U.S. were unprepared and overwhelmed. News footage showed travelers queued for hours, shoulder to shoulder, waiting to be admitted to the U.S. Some of those travelers already were suffering from the disease; they spread it to others. On March 11, New York had slightly more than 220 diagnosed cases. Two weeks later, it had more than 25,000. Genetic testing showed that most of the infection in New York was from the coronavirus variant that had come through Europe to the United States, rather than directly from China (where most of the early cases in Washington State originated).

Aviation is safe because, even after all the advances in forecasting and technology, its culture still imagines emergencies and rehearses steps for dealing with them.

Especially in the post-9/11 era of intensified concern about threats of all sorts, American public-health officials have also imagined a full range of crises, and have prepared ways to limit their worst effects. The resulting official “playbooks” are the equivalent of cockpit emergency checklists

the White House spokesperson, Kayleigh McEnany, then claimed that whatever “thin packet of paper” Obama had left was inferior to a replacement that the Trump administration had supposedly cooked up, but which has never been made public. The 69-page, single-spaced Obama-administration document is officially called “Playbook for Early Response to High-Consequence Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents” and is freely available online. It describes exactly what the Trump team was determined not to do.

What I found remarkable was how closely the Obama administration’s recommendations tracked with those set out 10 years earlier by the George W. Bush administration, in response to its chastening experience with bird flu. The Bush-era work, called “National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza” and publicly available here, differs from the Obama-era playbook mainly in the simpler forms of technology on which it could draw

consider the one below, and see how, sentence by sentence, these warnings from 2005 match the headlines of 2020. The topic was the need to divide responsibility among global, national, state, and community jurisdictions in dealing with the next pandemic. The fundamental premise—so widely shared that it barely needed to be spelled out—was that the U.S. federal government would act as the indispensable flywheel, as it had during health emergencies of the past. As noted, it would work with international agencies and with governments in all affected areas to coordinate a global response. Within its own borders it would work with state agencies to detect the potential for the disease’s spread and to contain cases that did arise:

Referring to the detailed pandemic playbooks from the Bush and Obama administrations, John R. Allen told me: “The moment you get confirmation of a problem, you would move right to the timeline. Decisions by the president, actions by the secretary of defense and the CDC, right down the list. You’d start executing.”Or, in the case of the current administration, you would not. Reading these documents now is like discovering a cockpit checklist in the smoking wreckage.

4. The Pilot

a virtue of Sully is the reminder that when everything else fails—the forecasts, the checklists, the triply redundant aircraft systems—the skill, focus, and competence of the person at the controls can make the difference between life and death.

So too in the public response to a public-health crisis. The system was primed to act, but the person at the top of the system had to say, “Go.” And that person was Donald Trump.

n a resigned way, the people I spoke with summed up the situation this way: You have a head of government who doesn’t know anything, and doesn’t read anything, and is at the mercy of what he sees on TV. “And all around him, you have this carnival,”

“There would be some ballast in the relationship,” this person said. “Now all you’ve got is the trade friction”—plus the personal business deals that the president’s elder daughter, Ivanka, has made in China,

5. The Control Systems

The deadliest airline crash in U.S. history occurred in 1979. An American Airlines DC-10 took off from O’Hare Airport, in Chicago—and just as it was leaving the ground, an incorrectly mounted engine ripped away from one of the wings. When the engine’s pylon was pulled off, it cut the hydraulic lines that led from the cockpit to the control surfaces on the wings and tail. From that point on, the most skillful flight crew in the world could not have saved the flight.

By the time the pandemic emerged, it may have already been too late. The hydraulic lines may already have been too damaged to transmit the signals. It was Trump himself who cut them.

The more complex the organization, the more its success or failure turns on the skill of people in its middle layers—the ones who translate a leader’s decision to the rest of the team in order to get results. Doctors depend on nurses; architects depend on contractors and craftsmen; generals depend on lieutenants and sergeants

Because Donald Trump himself had no grasp of this point, and because he and those around him preferred political loyalists and family retainers rather than holdovers from the “deep state,” the whole federal government became like a restaurant with no cooks, or a TV station with stars but no one to turn the cameras on.

“There is still resilience and competence in the working-level bureaucracy,” an intelligence-agency official told me. “But the layers above them have been removed.”

Traditionally, the National Security Council staff has comprised a concentration of highly knowledgeable, talented, and often ambitious younger figures, mainly on their way to diplomatic or academic careers.

“There is nobody now who can play the role of ‘senior China person,’” a former intelligence official told me. “In a normal administration, you’d have a lot of people who had spent time in Asia, spent time in China, knew the goods and bads.” Also in a normal administration, he and others pointed out, China and the United States would have numerous connective strands

The United States still possesses the strongest economy in the world, its military is by far the most powerful, its culture is diverse, and, confronted with the vicissitudes of history, the country has proved resilient. But a veteran of the intelligence world emphasized that the coronavirus era revealed a sobering reality. “Our system has a single point-of-failure: an irrational president.” At least in an airplane cockpit, the first officer can grab the controls from a captain who is steering the aircraft toward doom.

Every president is “surprised” by how hard it is to convert his own wishes into government actions

Presidents cope with this discovery in varying ways. The people I spoke with had served in past administrations as early as the first George Bush’s. George H. W. Bush came to office with broad experience in the federal government—as much as any other president. He had been vice president for eight years, a CIA director, twice an ambassador, and a member of Congress. He served only four years in the Oval Office but began with a running start. Before he became president, Bill Clinton had been a governor for 12 years and had spent decades learning and talking about government policies. A CIA official told me that Clinton would not read his President’s Daily Briefs in the morning, when they arrived, but would pore over them late at night and return them with copious notes. George W. Bush’s evolution from dependence on the well-traveled Dick Cheney, in his first term, to more confident control, in his second, has been well chronicled. As for Obama, Paul Triolo told me: “By the end of his eight years, Obama really understood how to get the bureaucracy to do what he wanted done, and how to get the information he needed to make decisions.” The job is far harder than it seems. Donald Trump has been uninterested in learning the first thing about it.

In a situation like this, some of those in the “regular” government decide to struggle on. Others quit—literally, or in the giving-up sense

The ‘process’ is just so chaotic that it’s not a process at all. There’s no one at the desk. There’s no one to read the memos. No one is there.”

“If this could happen to Fauci, it makes people think that if they push too hard in the wrong direction, they’ll get their heads chopped off. There is no reason in the world something called #FireFauci should even exist. The nation’s leaders should maintain high regard for scientific empiricism, insight, and advice, and must not be professionally or personally risk averse when it comes to understanding and communicating messages about public safety and health.”

Over nearly two decades, the U.S. government had assembled the people, the plans, the connections, and the know-how to spare this nation the worst effects of the next viral mutation that would, someday, arise. That someday came, and every bit of the planning was for naught. The deaths, the devastation, the unforeseeable path ahead—they did not have to occur.

The language of an NTSB report is famously dry and clinical—just the facts. In the case of the pandemic, what it would note is the following: “There was a flight plan. There was accurate information about what lay ahead. The controllers were ready. The checklists were complete. The aircraft was sound. But the person at the controls was tweeting. Even if the person at the controls had been able to give effective orders, he had laid off people that would carry them out. This was a preventable catastrophe.”

In the past two decades, the list of British calamities, policy misjudgments, and forecasting failures has been eye-watering: the disaster of Iraq, the botched Libyan intervention in 2011, the near miss of Scottish independence in 2014, the woeful handling of Britain’s divorce from the European Union from 2016 onward

What emerges is a picture of a country whose systemic weaknesses were exposed with appalling brutality, a country that believed it was stronger than it was, and that paid the price for failures that have built up for years

The most difficult question about all this is also the simplest: Why?

The human immune system actually has two parts. There is, as Cummings correctly identifies, the adaptive part. But there is also an innate part, preprogrammed as the first line of defense against infectious disease. Humans need both. The same is true of a state and its government, said those I spoke with—many of whom were sympathetic to Cummings’s diagnosis. Without a functioning structure, the responsive antibodies of the government and its agencies cannot learn on the job. When the pandemic hit, both parts of Britain’s immune system were found wanting.

Britain’s pandemic story is not all bad. The NHS is almost universally seen as having risen to the challenge; the University of Oxford is leading the race to develop the first coronavirus vaccine for international distribution, backed with timely and significant government cash; new hospitals were built and treatments discovered with extraordinary speed; the welfare system did not collapse, despite the enormous pressure it suddenly faced; and a national economic safety net was rolled out quickly.

One influential U.K. government official told me that although individual mistakes always happen in a fast-moving crisis, and had clearly taken place in Britain’s response to COVID-19, it was impossible to escape the conclusion that Britain was simply not ready. As Ian Boyd, a professor and member of SAGE, put it: “The reality is, there has been a major systemic failure.”

“It’s obvious that the British state was not prepared for” the pandemic, this official told me. “But, even worse, many parts of the state thought they were prepared, which is significantly more dangerous.”

When the crisis came, too much of Britain’s core infrastructure simply failed, according to senior officials and experts involved in the pandemic response

Like much of the Western world, Britain had prepared for an influenza pandemic, whereas places that were hit early—Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan—had readied themselves for the type of respiratory illness that COVID-19 proved to be.

The consequences may be serious and long term, but the most immediately tragic effect was that creating space in hospitals appears to have been prioritized over shielding Britain’s elderly, many of whom were moved to care homes, part of what Britain calls the social-care sector, where the disease then spread. Some 25,000 patients were discharged into these care homes between March 17 and April 16, many without a requirement that they secure a negative coronavirus test beforehand.

There was a bit too much exceptionalism about how brilliant British science was at the start of this outbreak, which ended up with a blind spot about what was happening in Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, where we just weren’t looking closely enough, and they turned out to be the best in the world at tackling the coronavirus,” a former British cabinet minister told me.

The focus on influenza pandemics and the lack of a tracing system were compounded by a shortfall in testing capacity.

Johnson’s strategy throughout was one that his hero Winston Churchill raged against during the First World War, when he concluded that generals had been given too much power by politicians. In the Second World War, Churchill, by then prime minister and defense secretary, argued that “at the summit, true politics and strategy are one.” Johnson did not take this approach, succumbing—as his detractors would have it—to fatalistic management rather than bold leadership, empowering the generals rather than taking responsibility himself

“It was a mixture of poor advice and fatalism on behalf of the experts,” one former colleague of Johnson’s told me, “and complacency and boosterism on behalf of the PM.”

What it all adds up to, then, is a sobering reality: Institutional weaknesses of state capacity and advice were not corrected by political judgment, and political weaknesses were not corrected by institutional strength. The system was hardwired for a crisis that did not come, and could not adapt quickly enough to the one that did.

Britain’s NHS has come to represent the country itself, its sense of identity and what it stands for. Set up in 1948, it became known as the first universal health-care system of any major country in the world (although in reality New Zealand got there first). Its creation, three years after victory in the Second World War, was a high-water mark in the country’s power and prestige—a time when it was a global leader, an exception.

Every developed country in the world, apart from the United States, has a universal health-care system, many of which produce better results than the NHS.

Yet from its beginnings, the NHS has occupied a unique hold on British life. It is routinely among the most trusted institutions in the country. Its key tenet—that all Britons will have access to health care, free at the point of service—symbolizes an aspirational egalitarianism that, even as inequality has risen since the Margaret Thatcher era, remains at the core of British identity.

In asking the country to rally to the NHS’s defense, Johnson was triggering its sense of self, its sense of pride and national unity—its sense of exceptionalism.

Before the coronavirus, the NHS was already under considerable financial pressure. Waiting times for appointments were rising, and the country had one of the lowest levels of spare intensive-care capacity in Europe. In 2017, Simon Stevens, the NHS’s chief executive, compared the situation to the time of the health sevice’s founding decades prior: an “economy in disarray, the end of empire, a nation negotiating its place in the world.”

When the pandemic hit, then, Britain was not the strong, successful, resilient country it imagined, but a poorly governed and fragile one. The truth is, Britain was sick before it caught the coronavirus.

In effect, Britain was rigorously building capacity to help the NHS cope, but releasing potentially infected elderly, and vulnerable, patients in the process. By late June, more than 19,000 people had died in care homes from COVID-19. Separate excess-death data suggest that the figure may be considerably higher

Britain failed to foresee the dangers of such an extraordinary rush to create hospital capacity, a shift that was necessary only because of years of underfunding and decades of missed opportunities to bridge the divide between the NHS and retirement homes, which other countries, such as Germany, had found the political will to do.

Ultimately, the scandal is a consequence of a political culture that has proved unable to confront and address long-term problems, even when they are well known.

other health systems, such as Germany’s, which is better funded and decentralized, performed better than Britain’s. Those I spoke with who either are in Germany or know about Germany’s success told me there was an element of luck about the disparity with Britain. Germany had a greater industrial base to produce medical testing and personal protective equipment, and those who returned to Germany with the virus from abroad were often younger and healthier, meaning the initial strain on its health system was less.

However, this overlooks core structural issues—resulting from political choices in each country—that meant that Germany proved more resilient when the crisis came, whether because of the funding formula for its health system, which allows individuals more latitude to top up their coverage with private contributions, or its decentralized nature, which meant that separate regions and hospitals were better able to respond to local outbreaks and build their own testing network.

Also unlike Britain, which has ducked the problem of reforming elderly care, Germany created a system in 1995 that everyone pays into, avoids catastrophic costs, and has cross-party support.

A second, related revelation of the crisis—which also exposed the failure of the British state—is that underneath the apparent simplicity of the NHS’s single national model lies an engine of bewildering complexity, whose lines of responsibility, control, and accountability are unintelligible to voters and even to most politicians.

Britain, I was told, has found a way to be simultaneously overcentralized and weak at its center. The pandemic revealed the British state’s inability to manage the nation’s health:

Since at least the 1970s, growing inequality between comparatively rich southeast England (including London) and the rest of the country has spurred all parties to pledge to “rebalance the economy” and make it less reliant on the capital. Yet large parts remain poorer than the European average. According to official EU figures, Britain has five regions with a per capita gross domestic product of less than $25,000. France, Germany, Ireland, Austria, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden have none

If Britain were part of the United States, it would be anywhere from the third- to the eighth-poorest state, depending on the measure.

Britain’s performance in this crisis has been so bad, it is damaging the country’s reputation, both at home and abroad.

Inside Downing Street, officials believe that the lessons of the pandemic apply far beyond the immediate confines of elderly care and coronavirus testing, taking in Britain’s long-term economic failures and general governance, as well as what they regard as its ineffective foreign policy and diplomacy.

the scale of the task itself is enormous. “We need a complete revamp of our government structure because it’s not fit for purpose anymore,” Boyd told me. “I just don’t know if we really understand our weakness.”

In practice, does Johnson have the confidence to match his diagnosis of Britain’s ills, given the timidity of his approach during the pandemic? The nagging worry among even Johnson’s supporters in Parliament is that although he may campaign as a Ronald Reagan, he might govern as a Silvio Berlusconi, failing to solve the structural problems he has identified.

This is not a story of pessimistic fatalism, of inevitable decline. Britain was able to partially reverse a previous slump in the 1980s, and Germany, seen as a European laggard in the ‘90s, is now the West’s obvious success story. One of the strengths of the Westminster parliamentary system is that it occasionally produces governments—like Johnson’s—with real power to effect change, should they try to enact it.

It has been overtaken by many of its rivals, whether in terms of health provision or economic resilience, but does not seem to realize it. And once the pandemic passes, the problems Britain faces will remain: how to sustain institutions so that they bind the country together, not pull it apart; how to remain prosperous in the 21st century’s globalized economy; how to promote its interests and values; how to pay for the ever-increasing costs of an aging population.

“The really important question,” Boyd said, “is whether the state, in its current form, is structurally capable of delivering on the big-picture items that are coming, whether pandemics or climate change or anything else.”

the signs of a crisis that looks like the Great Depression are impossible to hide. In Anaheim, Calif., home to Disneyland, cars formed half-mile-long lines in two different directions, waiting to pick up free food. In San Antonio, 10,000 cars waited for hours to receive food from a food bank. Even still, Republicans balk at expanding access to food stamps while hunger is on the rise. Nearly one in five children 12 and younger don’t have enough to eat.

That “way of life” may also begin to look like mass homelessness. Through the first five days of April, 31 percent of tenants nationwide had failed to pay their rent

Forty-three million households rent in the U.S., but there is no public rental assistance for residents who lose the ability to afford their rent.

Many elected officials in the Republican Party have access to Covid-19 testing, quality health care and the ultimate cushion of wealth to protect them. Yet they suggest others take the “risk” of returning to work as an act of patriotism

While the recent stimulus bills doled out trillions of dollars to corporate America and the “financial sector,” the smallest allocations have provided cash, food, rent or health care for citizens. The gaps in the thin membrane of a safety net for ordinary Americans have made it impossible to do anything other than return to work.

This isn’t just malfeasance or incompetence. Part of the “American way of life” for at least some of these elected officials is keeping workers just poor enough to ensure that the “essential” work force stays shows up each day

In place of decent wages, hazard pay, robust distribution of personal protective equipment and the simplest guarantees of health and safety, these lawmakers use the threat of starvation and homelessness to keep the work force intact.

In the case of the meatpacking industry, there is not even a veil of choice, as those jobs are inexplicably labeled essential, as if life cannot go on without meat consumption

The largely immigrant and black meatpacking work force has been treated barely better than the carcasses they process. They are completely expendable. Thousands have tested positive, but the plants chug along, while employers offer the bare minimum by way of safety protections, according to workers. If there were any question about the conditions endured in meatpacking plants, consider that 145 meat inspectors have been diagnosed with Covid-19 and three have died.

Discipline in the U.S. has always included low and inconsistent unemployment and welfare combined with stark deprivation. Each has resulted in a hyper-productive work force with few benefits in comparison to America’s peer countries.

if the social distancing and closures were ever going to be successful, it would have meant providing all workers with the means to live in comfort at home while they waited out the disease. Instead, they have been offered the choice of hunger and homelessness or death and disease at work.

The governor of Iowa, Kim Reynolds, made this painfully clear when she announced that not only was Iowa reopening, but that furloughed workers in private or public employment who refused to work out of fear of being infected would lose current unemployment benefits. She described these workers’ choices as a “voluntary quit.”

This is exacerbated by the reluctance of the Trump administration to bail out state governments. That the U.S. government would funnel trillions to corporate America but balk at sending money to state governments also appears to be part of “the American way of life” that resembles the financial sector bailout in 2008.

These are also the bitter fruits of decades of public policies that have denigrated the need for a social safety net while gambling on growth to keep the heads of U.S. workers above water just enough to ward off any real complaints or protests.

During the long and uneven recovery from the Great Recession, the warped distribution of wealth led to protests and labor organizing. The crisis unfolding today is already deeper and much more catastrophic to a wider swath of workers than anything since the 1930s. The status quo is untenable.

Even before the pandemic struck, local public health agencies had lost almost a quarter of their overall workforce since 2008 — a reduction of almost 60,000 workers

The agencies’ main source of federal funding — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s emergency preparedness budget — had been cut 30 percent since 2003. The Trump administration had proposed slicing even deeper.

According to David Himmelstein of the CUNY School of Public Health, global consensus is that, at minimum, 6 percent of a nation’s health spending should be devoted to public health efforts. The United States, he said, has never spent more than half that much.

the problems have been left to fester.

Delaware County, Pa., a heavily populated Philadelphia suburb, did not even have a public health department when the pandemic struck and had to rely on a neighbor to mount a response.

With plunging tax receipts straining local government budgets, public health agencies confront the possibility of further cuts in an economy gutted by the coronavirus. It is happening at a time when health departments are being asked to do more than ever.

While the country spends roughly $3.6 trillion every year on health, less than 3 percent of that spending goes to public health and prevention

“Why an ongoing government function should depend on episodic grants rather than consistent funding, I don’t know,” he added. “That would be like seeing that the military is going to apply for a grant for its regular ongoing activities.”

Compared with Canada, the United Kingdom and northern European countries, the United States — with a less generous social safety net and no universal health care — is investing less in a system that its people rely on more.

Himmelstein said that the United States has never placed much emphasis on public health spending but that the investment began to decline even further in the early 2000s. The Great Recession fueled further cuts.

Plus, the U.S. public health system relies heavily on federal grants.

“That’s the way we run much of our public health activity for local health departments. You apply to the CDC, which is the major conduit for federal funding to state and local health departments,” Himmelstein said. “You apply to them for funding for particular functions, and if you don’t get the grant, you don’t have the funding for that.”

Many public health officials say a lack of a national message and approach to the pandemic has undermined their credibility and opened them up to criticism.

Few places were less prepared for covid-19’s arrival than Delaware County, Pa., where Republican leaders had decided they did not need a public health department at all

At the same time, many countries that invest more in public health infrastructure also provide universal medical coverage that enables them to provide many common public health services as part of their main health-care-delivery system.

Taylor and other elected officials worked out a deal with neighboring Chester County in which Delaware County paid affluent Chester County’s health department to handle coronavirus operations for both counties for now.

One reason health departments are so often neglected is their work focuses on prevention — of outbreaks, sexually transmitted diseases, smoking-related illnesses. Local health departments describe a frustrating cycle: The more successful they are, the less visible problems are and the less funding they receive. Often, that sets the stage for problems to explode again — as infectious diseases often do.

It has taken years for many agencies to rebuild budgets and staffing from deep cuts made during the last recessio

During the past decade, many local health departments have seen annual rounds of cuts, punctuated with one-time infusions of money following crises such as outbreaks of Zika, Ebola, measles and hepatitis. The problem with that cycle of feast or famine funding is that the short-term money quickly dries up and does nothing to address long-term preparedness.

“It’s a silly strategic approach when you think about what’s needed to protect us long term,”

She compared the country’s public health system to a house with deep cracks in the foundation. The emergency surges of funding are superficial repairs that leave those cracks unaddressed.

“We came into this pandemic at a severe deficit and are still without a strategic goal to build back that infrastructure. We need to learn from our mistakes,”

With the economy tanking, the tax bases for cities and counties have shrunken dramatically — payroll taxes, sales taxes, city taxes. Many departments have started cutting staff. Federal grants are no sure thing.

80 percent of counties have reported their budget was affected in the current fiscal year because of the crisis. Prospects are even more dire for future budget periods, when the full impact of reduced tax revenue will become evident.

Christine Hahn, medical director for Idaho’s division of public health and a 25-year public health veteran, has seen the state make progress in coronavirus testing and awareness. But like so many public health officials across the country taking local steps to deal with what has become a national problem, she is limited by how much government leaders say she can do and by what citizens are willing to do.

“I’ve been through SARS, the 2009 pandemic, the anthrax attacks, and of course I’m in rural Idaho, not New York City and California,” Hahn said. “But I will say this is way beyond anything I’ve ever experienced as far as stress, workload, complexity, frustration, media and public interest, individual citizens really feeling very strongly about what we’re doing and not doing.”

“I think the general population didn’t really realize we didn’t have a health department. They just kind of assumed that was one of those government agencies we had,” Taylor said. “Then the pandemic hit, and everyone was like, ‘Wait, hold on — we don’t have a health department? Why don’t we have a health department?’ ”

“People locally are looking to see what’s happening in other states, and we’re constantly having to talk about that and address that,”

“I’m mindful of the credibility of our messaging as people say, ‘What about what they’re doing in this place? Why are we not doing what they’re doing?’ ”

Many health experts worry the challenges will multiply in the fall with the arrival of flu season.

“The unfolding tragedy here is we need people to see local public health officials as heroes in the same way that we laud heart surgeons and emergency room doctors,” Westergaard, the Wisconsin epidemiologist, said. “The work keeps getting higher, and they’re falling behind — and not feeling appreciated by their communities.”

Biden said Congress should come together to pass a "robust" aid package, but also repeated his call for "immediate relief" in the lame-duck period, before he takes office.

He also laid out a laundry list of economic goals that must be addressed early on in his administration. These include keeping businesses and schools open safely, delivering economic relief for those who have lost jobs or had hours cut, stabilizing the nation's health care system and addressing racial inequities the virus has laid bare.

Yellen would become the first woman to lead the department in its 231 years of existence.

She would be just the fourth woman and the first Black woman to lead the CEA since it was established nearly 75 years ago.

Biden also named Wally Adeyemo, who, if confirmed, would become the Treasury Department's first Black deputy secretary.

Tanden — who is the CEO of the left-leaning public policy organization the Center for American Progress and a veteran of both the Clinton and Obama administrations — would be the first woman of color to lead OMB.

Mr. Trump sent mixed messages in his own day-after analysis. During the debate, Mr. Trump said Mr. Biden was beholden to the most liberal members of his party, including Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and a group of four female House members, known as The Squad, which includes Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D., N.Y.). But Wednesday, Mr. Trump said on Twitter that Mr. Biden was in fact not listening to the Left, and that he had spent the debate “throwing Bernie, AOC PLUS 3, and the rest, to the wolves!”

But Mr. Trump’s inability to convey a central argument for his candidacy also contrasts with the past two successful presidential campaigns.

But Mr. Trump sometimes overlooked his own record.

During the portion of the evening focused on the economy, Mr. Biden promised to increase the corporate tax rate to 28% from 21%. Mr. Trump interjected, “Why didn’t you do it before, when you were vice president with Obama?” “Because you, in fact, passed that,” Mr. Biden responded, referring to the 2017 tax law cutting the rate to 21%. “That was your tax proposal.”

West Wing aides, shaken by polls showing the president badly trailing Joseph R. Biden Jr., worried that they were living through the final days of the Trump administration

Late in the day, the stock market collapsed when Mr. Trump abruptly called off talks for a congressional coronavirus relief bill after the Fed chair, Jerome H. Powell, said such a stimulus was badly needed.

Some White House staff members wondered whether Mr. Trump’s behavior was spurred by a cocktail of drugs he has been taking to treat the coronavirus, including dexamethasone, a steroid that can cause mood swings and can give a false level of energy and a sense of euphoria.

Prominent supporters of the administration said Mr. Trump should have stayed at the hospital until he was no longer infectious or should remain confined to his residence.

There were no answers, either, on when Mr. Trump last tested negative for the virus — a crucial piece of information that the White House and Dr. Conley have refused to answer and would establish the known state of Mr. Trump’s health before the presidential debate last Tuesday or before he attended a fund-raiser in New Jersey on Thursday. The White House first made public that Mr. Trump had tested positive early last Friday.

He also promised that vaccines were "coming momentarily", although the US Centers for Disease Control has said no vaccine is expected to be widely available before the middle of next year.

It is a message almost messianic in its undertones - one that the rest of his party is amplifying. The president has suffered and overcome, and will lead the nation to a promised land beyond the virus.

He could experience a relapse or long-term medical difficulties. Americans who have lost loved ones to the disease may find his words and actions ill-considered or offensive.

But he said the medical team agreed the president's status and progress "support his safe return home, where he'll be surrounded by world-class medical care 24/7".

Dr Conley refused to answer questions about when Mr Trump last received a negative test or to go into the specifics of his treatment. He would not offer details regarding the president's scans to check for pneumonia, citing patient protection laws.

Press secretary Kayleigh McEnany became the latest high-profile figure close to the president to confirm a positive test earlier on Monday.

First Lady Melania Trump, senior aides and three Republican senators have also tested positive.

At least 12 people close to Mr Trump have now tested positive, as have several junior staff members.