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Trump's focus on the economic fallout of the crisis is driven in part by his own belief that it will dictate his political future. Facing a potential recession, Trump has fretted that the coronavirus pandemic could cost him his job in November, though polls have shown his approval rating largely holding steady through the crisis.As the crisis worsened, Trump held off canceling his political rallies, hopeful he would be able to remain on the campaign trail even amid the outbreak. But eventually it became clear his preferred outlet for speaking to supporters and touring the country would temporarily end -- and that, like most Americans, Trump would be constrained to his home -- the White House.

Perhaps the sensation of imprisonment during quarantine might make us imagine what real imprisonment feels like.

There are, of course, actual prisons where we have warehoused human beings who have no relief from the threat of the coronavirus. There are refugee camps and detention centers that are de facto prisons. There is the economic imprisonment of poverty and precariousness, where a missing paycheck can mean homelessness, where illness without health insurance can mean death.

Is it too much to hope that the forced isolation of many Americans, and the forced labor of others, might compel radical acts of self-reflection, self-assessment and, eventually, solidarity?

What this crisis has revealed is that, while almost all of us can become vulnerable — even corporations and the wealthy — our government prioritizes the protection of the least vulnerable.

A crisis often induces fear and hatred. Already we are seeing a racist blowback against Asians and Asian-Americans for the “Chinese virus.

Covid-19, however terrible, is only a movie villain. Our real enemy does not come from the outside, but from within. Our real enemy is not the virus but our response to the virus — a response that has been degraded and deformed by the structural inequalities of our society.

America has a history of settler colonization and capitalism that ruthlessly exploited natural resources and people, typically the poor, the migratory, the black and the brown

That history manifests today in our impulse to hoard, knowing that we live in an economy of self-reliance and scarcity; in our dependence on the cheap labor of women and racial minorities; and in our lack of sufficient systems of health care, welfare, universal basic income and education to take care of the neediest among us.

we have a choice: Will we accept a world of division and scarcity, where we must fight over insufficient resources and opportunities, or imagine a future when our society is measured by how well it takes care of the ill, the poor, the aged and the different?

if our society looks the same after the defeat of Covid-19, it will be a Pyrrhic victory. We can expect a sequel, and not just one sequel, but many, until we reach the finale: climate catastrophe. If our fumbling of the coronavirus is a preview of how the United States will handle that disaster, then we are doomed.

Americans will eventually emerge from isolation and take stock of the fallen, both the people and the ideas that did not make it through the crisis. And then we will have to decide which story will let the survivors truly live.

what the administration should have been doing in January to prepare us for today.

She cites the delay on tests, without which “cases go undetected and people continue to circulate” as a leading issue along with other missed federal government responses—many of which are still not fully operational

The prescient recommendations from experts across disciplines in the period before COVID-19 reached American shores—about testing, equipment, and distancing—make clear that more than any single factor, it was Trump’s squandering of out lead-time which should have been used to prepare for the pandemic that has exacerbated this crisis.

What follows is an annotated timeline revealing the warning signs the administration received and showing how slow the administration was to act on these recommendations.

The Early Years: Warnings Ignored

2017: Trump administrations officials are briefed on an intelligence document titled “Playbook for Early Response to High-Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents.” That’s right. The administration literally had an actual playbook for what to do in the early stages of a pandemic

February 2018: The Washington Post writes “CDC to cut by 80 percent efforts to prevent global disease outbreak.” The meat of the story is “Countries where the CDC is planning to scale back include some of the world’s hot spots for emerging infectious disease, such as China, Pakistan, Haiti, Rwanda and Congo.”

May 2018: At an event marking the 100 year anniversary of the 1918 pandemic, Borio says “pandemic flu” is the “number 1 health security issue” and that the U.S. is not ready to respond.

One day later her boss, Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer is pushed out of the administration and the global health security team is disbanded

Beth Cameron, former senior director for global health security on the National Security Council adds: “It is unclear in his absence who at the White House would be in charge of a pandemic,” Cameron said, calling it “a situation that should be immediately rectified.” Note: It was not

January 2019: The director of National Intelligence issues the U.S. Intelligence Community’s assessment of threats to national security. Among its findings:

A novel strain of a virulent microbe that is easily transmissible between humans continues to be a major threat, with pathogens such as H5N1 and H7N9 influenza and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus having pandemic potential if they were to acquire efficient human-to-human transmissibility.”

Page 21: “We assess that the United States and the world will remain vulnerable to the next flu pandemic or large scale outbreak of a contagious disease that could lead to massive rates of death and disability, severely affect the world economy, strain international resources, and increase calls on the United States for support.”

September, 2019: The Trump Administration ended the pandemic early warning program, PREDICT, which trained scientists in China and other countries to identify viruses that had the potential to turn into pandemics. According to the Los Angeles Times, “field work ceased when funding ran out in September,” two months before COVID-19 emerged in Wuhan Province, China.

2020: COVID-19 Arrives

anuary 3, 2020: The CDC is first alerted to a public health event in Wuhan, China

January 6, 2020: The CDC issues a travel notice for Wuhan due to the spreading coronavirus

Note: The Trump campaign claims that this marks the beginning of the federal government disease control experts becoming aware of the virus. It was 10 weeks from this point until the week of March 16 when Trump began to change his tone on the threat.

January 10, 2020: Former Trump Homeland Security Advisor Tom Bossert warns that we shouldn’t “jerk around with ego politics” because “we face a global health threat…Coordinate!”

January 18, 2020: After two weeks of attempts, HHS Secretary Alex Azar finally gets the chance to speak to Trump about the virus. The president redirects the conversation to vaping, according to the Washington Post. 

January 21, 2020: Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Disease at the CDC tells reporters, “We do expect additional cases in the United States.”

January 27, 2020: Top White House aides meet with Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney to encourage greater focus on the threat from the virus. Joe Grogan, head of the White House Domestic Policy Council warns that “dealing with the virus was likely to dominate life in the United States for many months.”

January 28, 2020: Two former Trump administration officials—Gottlieb and Borio—publish an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal imploring the president to “Act Now to Prevent an American Epidemic.” They advocate a 4-point plan to address the coming crisis:

(1) Expand testing to identify and isolate cases. Note: This did not happen for many weeks. The first time more than 2,000 tests were deployed in a single day was not until almost six weeks later, on March 11.

(3) Prepare hospital units for isolation with more gowns and masks. Note: There was no dramatic ramp-up in the production of critical supplies undertaken. As a result, many hospitals quickly experienced shortages of critical PPE materials. Federal agencies waited until Mid-March to begin bulk orders of N95 masks.

January 29, 2020: Trump trade advisor Peter Navarro circulates an internal memo warning that America is “defenseless” in the face of an outbreak which “elevates the risk of the coronavirus evolving into a full-blown pandemic, imperiling the lives of millions of Americans.”

January 30, 2020: Dr. James Hamblin publishes another warning about critical PPE materials in the Atlantic, titled “We Don’t Have Enough Masks.”

January 29, 2020: Republican Senator Tom Cotton reaches out to President Trump in private to encourage him to take the virus seriously.

Late January, 2020:  HHS sends a letter asking to use its transfer authority to shift $136 million of department funds into pools that could be tapped for combating the coronavirus. White House budget hawks argued that appropriating too much money at once when there were only a few U.S. cases would be viewed as alarmist.

Trump’s Chinese travel ban only banned “foreign nationals who had been in China in the last 14 days.” This wording did not—at all—stop people from arriving in America from China. In fact, for much of the crisis, flights from China landed in America almost daily filled with people who had been in China, but did not fit the category as Trump’s “travel ban” defined it.

January 31, 2020: On the same day Trump was enacting his fake travel ban, Foreign Policy reports that face masks and latex gloves are sold out on Amazon and at leading stores in New York City and suggests the surge in masks being sold to other countries needs “refereeing” in the face of the coming crisis.

February 4, 2020: Gottlieb and Borio take to the WSJ again, this time to warn the president that “a pandemic seems inevitable” and call on the administration to dramatically expand testing, expand the number of labs for reviewing tests, and change the rules to allow for tests of people even if they don’t have a clear known risk factor.

Note: Some of these recommendations were eventually implemented—25 days later.

February 5, 2020: HHS Secretary Alex Azar requests $2 billion to “buy respirator masks and other supplies for a depleted federal stockpile of emergency medical equipment.” He is rebuffed by Trump and the White House OMB who eventually send Congress a $500 million request weeks later.

February 4 or 5, 2020: Robert Kadlec, the assistant secretary for preparedness and response, and other intelligence officials brief the Senate Intelligence Committee that the virus poses a “serious” threat and that “Americans would need to take actions that could disrupt their daily lives.”

February 5, 2020: Senator Chris Murphy tweets: Just left the Administration briefing on Coronavirus. Bottom line: they aren't taking this seriously enough. Notably, no request for ANY emergency funding, which is a big mistake. Local health systems need supplies, training, screening staff etc. And they need it now.

February 9, 2020: The Washington Post reports that a group of governors participated in a jarring meeting with Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Robert Redfield that was much more alarmist than what they were hearing from Trump. “The doctors and the scientists, they were telling us then exactly what they are saying now,” Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) said.

the administration lifted CDC restrictions on tests. This is a factually true statement. But it elides that fact that they did so on March 3—two critical weeks after the third Borio/Gottlieb op-ed on the topic, during which time the window for intervention had shrunk to a pinhole.

February 20, 2020: Borio and Gottlieb write in the Wall Street Journal that tests must be ramped up immediately “while we can intervene to stop spread.”

February 23, 2020: Harvard School of Public Health professor issues warning on lack of test capability: “As of today, the US remains extremely limited in#COVID19 testing. Only 3 of ~100 public health labs haveCDC test kits working and CDC is not sharing what went wrong with the kits. How to know if COVID19 is spreading here if we are not looking for it.

February 24, 2020: The Trump administration sends a letter to Congress requesting a small dollar amount—between $1.8 billion and $2.5 billion—to help combat the spread of the coronavirus. This is, of course, a pittance

February 25, 2020: Messonier says she expects “community spread” of the virus in the United States and that “disruption to everyday life might be severe.” Trump is reportedly furious and Messonier’s warnings are curtailed in the ensuing weeks.

Trump mocks Congress in a White House briefing, saying “If Congress wants to give us the money so easy—it wasn’t very easy for the wall, but we got that one done. If they want to give us the money, we’ll take the money.”

February 26, 2020: Congress, recognizing the coming threat, offers to give the administration $6 billion more than Trump asked for in order to prepare for the virus.

February 27, 2020: In a leaked audio recording Sen. Richard Burr, chairman of the Intelligence Committee and author of the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act (PAHPA) and the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness and Advancing Innovation Act (reauthorization of PAHPA), was telling people that COVID-19 “is probably more akin to the 1918 pandemic.”

March 4, 2020: HHS says they only have 1 percent of respirator masks needed if the virus became a “full-blown pandemic.”

March 3, 2020: Vice President Pence is asked about legislation encouraging companies to produce more masks. He says the Trump administration is “looking at it.”

March 7, 2020: Fox News host Tucker Carlson, flies to Mar-a-Lago to implore Trump to take the virus seriously in private rather than embarrass him on TV. Even after the private meeting, Trump continued to downplay the crisis

March 9, 2020: Tom Bossert, Trump’s former Homeland Security adviser, publishes an op-ed saying it is “now or never” to act. He advocates for social distancing and school closures to slow the spread of the contagion.

Trump says that developments are “good for the consumer” and compares COVID-19 favorably to the common flu.

March 17, 2020: Facing continued shortages of the PPE equipment needed to prevent healthcare providers from succumbing to the virus, Oregon Senators Jeff Merkeley and Ron Wyden call on Trump to use the Defense Production Act to expand supply of medical equipment

March 18, 2020: Trump signs the executive order to activate the Defense Production Act, but declines to use it

At the White House briefing he is asked about Senator Chuck Schumer’s call to urgently produce medical supplies and ventilators. Trump responds: “Well we’re going to know whether or not it’s urgent.” Note: At this point 118 Americans had died from COVID-19.

March 20, 2020: At an April 2nd White House Press Conference, President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner who was made ad hoc point man for the coronavirus response said that on this date he began working with Rear Admiral John Polowczyk to “build a team” that would handle the logistics and supply chain for providing medical supplies to the states. This suggestion was first made by former Trump Administration officials January 28th

March 22, 2020: Six days after calling for a 15-day period of distancing, Trump tweets that this approach “may be worse than the problem itself.”

March 24, 2020: Trump tells Fox News that he wants the country opened up by Easter Sunday (April 12)

As Trump was speaking to Fox, there were 52,145 confirmed cases in the United States and the doubling time for daily new cases was roughly four days.

Dr. Venturi said those tests were essentially “useless” because they did not describe whether a person had the right level of antibodies and because no one knew yet how long they lasted.

Instead, he said, Italy’s reopening phase needs to rely on uninfected people, which he considered to be 90 percent of the population, and on social distancing and other protective measures.

In theory, even those lucky few would not need to wait for two consecutive negative swab tests — which sometimes take months — before being released from quarantine and allowed back to work. “It would be like a negative test result,” he said.

In the meantime, though, Dr. Venturi said it was impossible to consider a work force made up only of people showing neutralizing antibodies.

Results will take weeks more, but if confirmed, he said, it would show that people who test positive for an adequate level of neutralizing IgG antibodies do not pose a danger of contagion.

“I did it to free myself of this doubt,” said Mr. Passaggio, who last month showed Covid-19 symptoms, including a low fever. Unable to get tested for the virus, as swabs are generally reserved for the hospitalized, he took precautions to avoid contaminating others, including staying isolated for weeks.

Last Tuesday he got the results: high levels of immunoglobulin G, or IgG, antibodies. Mr. Passaggio said he understood from doctors on television that it meant a degree of immunity, confidence he was not a danger to others and that he could possibly “go to work before someone else.”

Mr. Francese said that a month ago, 50 people in the town showed clear symptoms of the virus, but that the health authorities failed to test them. They got sick, and then their relatives got sick and cases kept building.

The town, out of desperation, tracked down serological tests offered by a Chinese factory that the mayor said had an 96 percent accuracy rate, and which he said Italy’s national research center had approved.

Robbio has already tested about half of its residents and found and isolated many positive cases, about half of whom had symptoms, he said. He also said that the tests had shown 12 percent had IgG antibodies.

He said he considered those people “immune and thus would be eligible” for an eventual immunity license, despite health experts’ doubts.

An unpublished study conducted by the Israeli Health Ministry and Pfizer showed that vaccination reduced transmission by 89% to 94% and almost totally prevented hospitalization and death, according to press reports. Immunity kicks in fully about four weeks after the first vaccine dose, and then you are essentially bulletproof.

On a positive note, the CDC did say that fully vaccinated people who are asymptomatic don’t need to be tested.

that obvious recommendation should have come two months ago, before wasting so many tests on people who have high levels of circulating antibodies from vaccination.

n its guidance the CDC says the risks of infection in vaccinated people “cannot be completely eliminated.” True, we don’t have conclusive data that guarantees vaccination reduces risk to zero. We never will. We are operating in the realm of medical discretion based on the best available data, as practicing physicians have always done

The CDC highlights the vaccines’ stunning success but is ridiculously cautious about its implications. Public-health officials focus myopically on transmission risk while all but ignoring the broader health crisis stemming from isolation. The CDC acknowledges “potential” risks of isolation, but doesn’t go into details.

Separating family members was excessive and cruel, driven by narrow thinking that focused singularly on reducing viral transmission risk, heedless of the harm to the quality of human life.

As people yearn to be with their loved ones and rebuild communities, we shouldn’t repeat that mistake. We cannot exaggerate the public-health threat, as we did with hospital visitation rules, and keep crushing the human spirit with overly restrictive policies for vaccinated Americans.

Loneliness has become a public-health crisis. In pre-Covid times, it was estimated that 20% of American’s struggled with loneliness, a figure that has surely multiplied faster than research has been able to measure

self-harm among kids increased as much as 300% last year in some parts of the country

I too will invoke “common sense” to answer the big question so many are asking: What am I allowed to do after I’ve been vaccinated? Once a month has passed after your first shot, go back to normal.

Britain has long resisted the idea of requiring people to carry identity documents, and for some in the country, this issue carries authoritarian overtones.

Mr. Johnson acknowledged the sensitivities and pointed out that the certification plan would not be rolled out for a few months. The government plans to test the program in pilot locations, from a comedy club and nightclub in Liverpool to the FA Cup soccer final at Wembley Stadium.

Britain plans to classify countries according to a traffic light system, with visitors from green countries not required to isolate themselves, visitors from amber countries required to isolate at home for several days, and those from red countries required to continue quarantining in hotels.

With more than 31 million people having gotten at least one vaccine “jab,” and the country still largely in lockdown, Britain has dramatically driven down its new cases, hospital admissions and deaths from the virus.

Local and state officials begged Californians to not make holiday plans from Thanksgiving through to New Year. But even strict mandates here often go unenforced. Many businesses have collapsed, the film industry is mostly dormant.

And most schools in California have been closed since 13 March, with children isolated at home on computers, often with their parents away at work or trying to work alongside their children on overstretched Wi-Fi. And like most places, Covid-19 has hit Los Angeles' poor the hardest.

"We're sort of a pull yourself up by your bootstraps kind of country - we're very individually minded and it's hard for us to think about giving up what we feel is our right to do what we want,"

For every case of Covid in Beverly Hills, there are six times more in Compton. While two people from Bel Air have died, more than 230 people have lost their lives in working-class East LA.

And now, the virus is surging through LA's vast homeless population. People who live in Los Angeles are used to driving past dozens, hundreds or even thousands of people living on the streets every day.At the beginning of the pandemic, they were largely spared from infection - likely because they're so isolated as a population. Cities and counties are using trailers and motels to house Covid positive people without shelter.

Behind the building, a fabric tent meant to house the most vulnerable women on the streets is now a field hospital full of men with Covid, tended to by doctors and nurses covered head-to-toe in the now familiar protective gear."The Covid situation is the worst ever and this is the most horrific battle we've ever been in," says Reverend Andy Bales,

At the beginning of the pandemic in March, Mr Bales was relieved that the homeless population seemed spared from the coronavirus.But then in April, a beloved staff member at the mission, Gerald Shiroma, died of the virus. He was 56.

As exhausted frontline medical workers continue their fight, the fear is that things will continue to get worse.As the virus spreads, it's likely mutating more than we know, says Dr Neha Nanda.

News of the record-breaking statistic comes the same day the U.K. announced a major step in its race to develop COVID-19 vaccines, formally approving Pfizer and the German company BioNTech's vaccine for emergency use.

Even with a vaccine in sight, the U.S. continues to grapple with a major surge in new coronavirus infections.

"It's time to cancel everything. And if it isn't essential, don't do it," he said during a news conference.

"Anyone who has returned a confirmed positive test during this initial phase of testing in their team's market is isolated until they are cleared for leaving isolation"

more than 178,000 confirmed cases at colleges and universities since the pandemic began.

The “snitch form” yields a lot of power, and there’s potential for abuse, even false reports. But combined with the quarantine, there’s evidence it might be working.

“We need everyone to do their part,”

But we just call it the “snitch form.”You can report students for failing to wear a mask, failing to social distance, failing to wash their hands for at least 20 seconds, and failing to cough or sneeze into a tissue or elbow.

nearly 600 students tested positive the week of Sept. 6, Dr. Robbins announced a “last-ditch effort” to stem the outbreak: a two-week shelter-in-place recommendation.

At the University of Colorado, there’s sometimes an “us vs. them” mind-set pitting independent students against those in fraternities and sororities.

“I drove past the Hill last night,” Delaney Hartmann, a 19-year-old sophomore majoring in political science, told me recently, “and there were tons of people at restaurants, at the bars, not wearing masks.”

“I don’t want to blame every single individual who is living on the Hill who is in a sorority or fraternity,” she said. “But it is definitely a source of a lot of the outbreaks.”

Some fraternity and sorority members “have taken a while to truly understand” the seriousness of Covid-19

“The administration severely underestimated their ability to manage tens of thousands of college students going through the longest period of isolation and uncertainty in our lives.”

“I think if they’re already partying, they’re not really going to stop,”

“I was going into my very first college exam,” said Noah Cotton, 18, a freshman who lived in a dorm with a major outbreak. Instead of focusing on his answers, he wondered: “Do I have enough to eat? How am I going to be able to talk to people?”

“Most minority students don’t have the means to just leave the dorm, to travel, to get an apartment, to feel safe,” he said.

“Due to the actions the university took to contain a rise in cases early in the semester, including robust testing, isolation of positive students, and quarantines, Covid-19 cases have remained low on campus since the third week of September,”

South Korea’s economy is expected to decline by just 0.8% this year, the best among the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s forecasts for member nations.

When the supply of face masks ran short early on in the crisis, the government seized production.

The nation fast-tracked approval of domestic testing kits as soon as cases began hitting

It tapped into its relative wealth and hyperconnectivity, blasting text alerts to citizens if infections occurred in their area

The key to South Korea’s success came from blending technology and testing like no other country, centralized control and communication—and a constant fear of failure.

Some parts of its playbook wouldn’t work in most Western societies—and received backlash in South Korea as well

Nearly everyone in the country wears masks.

Every confirmed patient, even those with no or mild symptoms, gets isolated at hospitals or converted dormitories run by the government. Treatment is free.

As a result, South Korea never had to mandate a lockdown, so restaurants and business were able to stay open, cushioning the blow to the economy.

“No country has adapted to living with, and containing, the virus like South Korea,”

“You don’t need or want to eradicate the virus. But you modify your behavior and get on with life.”

It detected the country’s first case 10 days later using a test that screened for all known coronavirus strains—the same tactic practiced during the December simulation.

Health officials have unfettered access to individuals’ private mobile data, and early on used government websites to share the whereabouts of confirmed patients, plucked from smartphone GPS history

The government now offers anonymous testing and leaves out identifying information and specific names of places visited in contact-tracing disclosures.

After a major cluster linked to a megachurch in the city of Daegu emerged on Feb. 18, the government made a flurry of moves

Cases peaked in 11 days.

The day after cases reached a five-month high of 441 on Aug. 27, South Korea’s top public-health official gave a grim forecast: “We could see 800 to 2,000 infections next week

South Koreans took the advice and adjusted. Population mobility, as measured by local telecom operators, soon fell by one-quarter. Most schools closed and diners had to leave restaurants by 9 p.m. Aug. 27 turned out to be the peak.

At twice-a-day briefings, health officials express worry when they can only trace the origins of three-quarters of confirmed cases.

In total, South Korea, with a population of 52 million, has reported 23,455 cases and 395 deaths.

One reason South Korea was prepared: It learned painful lessons in 2015 from an outbreak of Middle East respiratory syndrome

“The only way to make the government prepared is to actually have an outbreak,”

After MERS, the government started twice-a-year training sessions simulating a rapid spread of viral disease

“Oddly enough, last December’s ‘war game’ was a novel coronavirus,”

After two weeks of aggressive social distancing, South Koreans could again head back to schools, gyms and sports stadiums.

One firm, Kogene Biotech Co., demonstrated a successful test and got the regulatory green light within four days. A second manufacturer would be added by Feb. 12. The tests all used the same methodology and could be sent to any of the country’s roughly 120 laboratories that promised turnaround times of between six to 24 hours.

Cases, which had been slowly rising, suddenly doubled in a day, to over 100. Experts predicted it would soon surge to levels seen nowhere else but China.

That triggered a Feb. 20 late-night message in a group chat with eight South Korean infectious-disease experts: “We need to quickly devise a way to conduct mass testing,”

an answer: drive-through clinics.

Dr. Kim sent a PowerPoint presentation to the group within hours, at 3:53 a.m., outlining how tests would take just 10 minutes and saved much-needed protective gear since outdoor workers didn’t have to change gowns after each patient

Two days later, cars rumbled through the country’s first drive-through clinic. Testing capacity multiplied 100 times, giving South Korea a critical early edge.

As South Korea’s coronavirus problems mounted, Mr. Moon intentionally kept his profile low. “His stance is that it’s more objective for an expert to hold the briefings, and that is the way to gain the trust of the people,”

Even with the swift response, a lack of hospital beds became a major issue. In just 11 days, South Korea’s case count had gone from 31 to 3,150. Thousands were waiting to be hospitalized. A handful died while waiting.

South Korea’s infectious-disease experts had a proposal. Confirmed patients should be divided into four categories, based on the risk profile and severity of symptoms, with only the most serious cases hospitalized. Those with mild or no symptoms should be isolated at makeshift treatment facilities.

Dr. Peck set up a meeting with senior officials from the Samsung conglomerate, asking that an empty facility near Daegu be lent to the South Korean government. By first having a company volunteer a venue, Dr. Peck recalled thinking, it would pressure South Korea’s health ministry to act.

About 80% of South Korea’s coronavirus patients have been hospitalized in the community treatment centers. Those who are asymptomatic or have mild symptoms are still sent there.

That changed in August. Unlike February’s outbreak, the new wave of infections fanned out across South Korea to all 15 of the country’s major cities and provinces. The country’s national testing capacity had by then expanded to 50,000 a day with test results notified within 24 hours, up from 20,000 in February

The U.S. conducted about 900,000 tests a day over the past week through Thursday, according to data from the Covid Tracking Project. But South Korea performs six times as many tests per confirmed Covid-19 case than the U.S. doe

South Korea’s three-tier system created in June for social distancing went off script. With health experts split on whether to adopt the maximum levels last month, a government advisory committee landed at a “level 2.5” social-distancing for the Seoul area that closed schools and banned church services and gatherings of more than 10 people.

On Tuesday, South Korea reported its lowest one-day infections in over a month, with just 61 cases.

Dr. Atlas’s position has been challenged by medical advisers around him who have backgrounds in infectious disease response, revealing a significant rift in the White House over the right approach. Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, has pushed for aggressive, broad testing even among young and healthy people, often clashing with Dr. Atlas in meetings.

“I would always be happy if we had 100 percent of students tested weekly,” Dr. Birx said on Wednesday in an appearance at Penn State University, “because I think testing changes behavior.”

Dr. Atlas at one point influenced the administration’s efforts to install new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance that said it was not necessary to test people without symptoms of Covid-19 even if they had been exposed to the virus, upsetting Dr. Birx and Dr. Robert R. Redfield, the C.D.C. director

The administration’s efforts to fund federal and state testing have long been fraught. In July, as administration officials and top Senate Republicans clashed over the contours of their initial $1 trillion proposal, the White House initially balked at providing billions of dollars to fund coronavirus testing and help federal health agencies.

Since the early days of the pandemic, Mr. Romer has argued for a wide-scale testing program, costing as much as $100 billion. He had hoped to persuade Dr. Atlas that if officials could quickly identify and isolate people carrying the virus, they would slow its spread and allow normal economic activity to resume more quickly.

In his email, sent to Dr. Atlas’s personal account, Mr. Romer proposed additional testing and isolation efforts that could allow far more Americans to return to work and shopping, generating economic activity that would be 10 or 100 times larger than the cost of the testing program itself.

Dr. Atlas replied that the push for such testing was the result of “a fundamental error of the public health people perpetrated on the world.”Mr. Romer said he was taken aback by the answer: “Atlas just responded in a way that just honestly made it seem like he was in over his head,” he said.

CNN chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta said that the coronavirus could spread at protests depending on factors like mask-wearing, how closely people gathered, and how long people stayed in close contact.

"It is a contagious virus. People being outside, people wearing masks, people moving by each other more quickly may reduce the likelihood of significant exponential growth. But that's still the concern."

The virus has particularly impacted African-Americans, who make up a disproportionate percentage of Covid-19 cases and deaths.

For one, the textbook combination of identification, isolation and quarantine for contacts helped stop the potential spread of coronavirus an Air Force basic training camp. Military doctors said their approach kept the case count to just five among 10,000 recruits at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland in Texas in March and April.

The base used techniques including quarantine, social distancing, early trainee screening, rapid isolation and monitored re-entry to slow the transmission, the researchers said in a report published by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Tuesday.

"Climate only would become an important seasonal factor in controlling COVID-19 once a large proportion of people within a given community are immune or resistant to infection," Collins wrote, citing experts in infectious disease transmission and climate modeling.

The US should have 100 million doses of one candidate Covid-19 vaccine by the end of the year, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and a member of the White House coronavirus task force, said Tuesday.

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

He rose from a political party bent on thwarting demographic change by subverting the democratic process; a party whose base was addicted to white identity politics, steeped in religious fundamentalism, and suffused with authoritarian cravings—a party which, infected by Trumpism, now spreads the multiple malignancies metastasized by Trump’s personal and political pathologies.

Since the civil rights revolution triggered an influx of resentful Southern whites, the GOP has catered to white grievance and anxiety.

Trump’s transformative contribution has been to make racial antagonism overt—a badge of pride that bonds him to his followers in opposition to a pluralist democracy that threatens their imperiled social and political hegemony.

Take the poll released last week by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) measuring the attitudes of “Fox News Republicans”—the 40 percent of party adherents who trust Fox as their primary source of TV news. The survey found that 91 percent oppose the Black Lives Matter movement; 90 percent believe that police killings of blacks are “isolated incidents”; and 58 think that whites are victimized by racial discrimination, compared to 36 percent who think blacks are.

He comprehends his audience all too well

Their animus toward immigration is equally strong. Substantial majorities believe that immigrants consume a disproportionate amount of governmental services, increase crime in local communities, and threaten our cultural and ethnic character.

That sense of racial and cultural besiegement pervades the 73 percent of Fox News Republicans who, the survey found, believe that white Christians suffer from “a lot” of societal discrimination—more than double the number who say that blacks do

Another key subgroup of the GOP base, white evangelicals, harbors similar attitudes. The poll found that the majority adamantly disbelieve that the legacy of racial discrimination makes it difficult for African Americans to succeed

The head of the PRRI, Robert P. Jones, concludes that Trump arouses white Christians “not despite, but through appeals to white supremacy” based on evoking “powerful fears about the loss of White Christian dominance.”

In 2016, Vox reports, Trump carried whites by 54 to 39 percent; in 2020, by 57 to 42 percent (per the raw exit polls)

Tucker Carlson serves as a cautionary tale. When Carlson dismissed, as gently as possible, the crackpot allegations of Trump lawyer Sidney Powell about a sweeping conspiracy using rogue voting machines, he was savaged across the right-wing echo chamber as a spineless quisling. Lesson learned.

fear of displacement helps explain the profound emotional connection between Trump and Republican voters. Their loyalty is not to the political philosophy traditionally embraced by the GOP, but a visceral sense of racial, religious, and cultural identity—and the need to preserve it—which is instinctively authoritarian and anti-democratic.

Bartels surveyed respondents regarding four statements which, taken together, read like a blueprint for Trump: The traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it. A time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands. Strong leaders sometimes have to bend the rules in order to get things done. It is hard to trust the results of elections when so many people will vote for anyone who offers a handout.

Reports Bump: “Most Republicans and Republican-leaning independents agreed with the first statement. . . . Nearly three-quarters agreed that election results should be treated with skepticism.” Republicans and Republican-leaning independents were also “significantly more likely to say they agreed with the other two statements than that they disagreed.”

This lies at the heart of Trump’s appeal: his shared sense of victimization by an insidious elite; his unvarnished denunciation of white America’s supposed enemies; and his promise to keep them at bay—if necessary, by force. For many in the Republican base, he fulfills a psychic longing for an American strongman.

In the New York Times, Katherine Stewart describes the growth of “a radical political ideology that is profoundly hostile to democracy and pluralism, and a certain political style that seeks to provoke moral panic, rewards the paranoid and views every partisan conflict as a conflagration, the end of the world.”

“Christian nationalism is a creation of a uniquely isolated messaging sphere. Many members of the rank and file get their main political information not just from messaging platforms that keep their audiences in a world that is divorced from reality, but also from dedicated religious networks and reactionary faith leaders.”

As Republican strategists well appreciate, a party whose appeal is confined to conservative whites is, over the demographic long term, doomed to defeat. The GOP’s design is to postpone as long as possible their electoral day of reckoning.

In launching his naked attempt to disenfranchise the majority of voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin through assertions of fraud unprecedented in their speciousness and scope, Trump took the GOP’s distaste for free and fair elections to its logical conclusion: the abrogation of American democracy at the highest level.

Trump justified his anti-democratic sociopathy by proliferating a plethora of groundless and preposterous falsehoods calculated to delegitimize our electoral processes. He claimed that millions of phony mail-in ballots had been cast for Biden; that voting machines had been re-engineered to exclude millions more cast for him; and that Republican election observers had been excluded from many polling places by a host of local officials bent on serving a labyrinthine conspiracy to purloin the White House.

Never once did he or his lawyers cite a shred of evidence supporting any material impropriety. Rather his purpose was to convince the Republican base that they were being cheated of their leader by the insidious “other.” Numerous polls confirm that it’s working; typical is a Politico/Morning Consult survey showing that 70 percent of Republicans don’t believe the election was fairly conducted.

As Trevor Potter, a Republican who formerly headed the Federal Election Commission, told the New York Times, Trump “is creating a road map to destabilization and chaos in future years. . . . What he’s saying, explicitly, is if a party doesn’t like the election result they have the right to change it by gaming the system.”

Support for Trump’s wall is nearly unanimous (96 percent); two-thirds (66 percent) favor barring refugees from entering the United States; and a majority (53 percent) support separating children from their parents when a family enters the country without permission.

Ultimately, this otherworldly obduracy stems from Trump’s manifest psychological illness: his imperishable narcissism; his ineradicable drive to be noticed; his relentless need to dominate; his comprehensive carelessness of all considerations save what pleases him in the moment. Television turned this moral pygmy into a mythic figure—and he cannot let go.

Republican elites want very much to turn the page on Donald Trump following his loss. But . . . they do not have any say in the matter, because their party now belongs to him. And the party belongs to Donald Trump because he has delivered to Republican voters exactly what they want.

a notable phenomenon of Trump’s presidency is the degree to which financially embattled working-class whites imagined, contrary to observable reality, that their economic situation had improved—or soon would. There are few better examples of how politics mirrors psychology more than lived experience.

This fidelity is why some Republican gurus remain committed to Trump’s strategy of maximizing support among middle-class and blue-collar whites. After all, they argue, despite Trump’s defeat the GOP did better than expected in senatorial and congressional races. Why risk tinkering with his formula?

Finally, economic populism is antithetical to the donor classes who, in truth, did better under Trump than did anyone else. They got their tax cuts and their judges—the GOP’s pipeline for judicial nominees, the Federalist Society, is dedicated to advancing pro-corporate jurisprudence. This is not the prescription for worker-friendly policies.

For the foreseeable future, Trumpism will define the GOP. The path to regeneration runs not through reform but, one fears, must proceed from self-destruction. The wait time will be painful for the party, and fateful for the country.

Federal health officials also offered two new ways to shorten quarantine periods. Those without symptoms may end quarantine after seven days if they are tested for the virus and receive a negative result, or after 10 days without a negative test.

“We are at the point now, even before Christmas, that there may not be room at your hospital, because we don’t have enough health care workers to take care of you,”

Some patients may not develop symptoms until two weeks after exposure, and even longer in a very small fraction of cases. Infected individuals may pass the virus to others before they develop symptoms; recent studies show they are most infectious two days before symptoms begin, and for about five days afterward.

Daily deaths have been exceeding 2,000 for the first time since early May, and close to 100,000 Americans are already hospitalized.

Until now, the C.D.C. has recommended a 14-day quarantine period following potential exposure, and Dr. Walke stressed that the full two weeks is still considered ideal and the surest way to curb transmissions.

Federal health officials also offered two new ways to shorten quarantine periods. Those without symptoms may end quarantine after seven days if they are tested for the virus and receive a negative result, or after 10 days without a negative test.

“We can safely reduce the length of quarantine, but accepting that there is a small residual risk that a person who is leaving quarantine early could transmit to someone else if they became infected,”

Some patients may not develop symptoms until two weeks after exposure, and even longer in a very small fraction of cases. Infected individuals may pass the virus to others before they develop symptoms; recent studies show they are most infectious two days before symptoms begin, and for about five days afterward.

Dr. Conley said Monday it was possible the president would no longer be contagious before the 10-day period ends.

The president has repeatedly played down the threat of the virus, which medical experts say is very real, especially for older people and people with pre-existing health problems. After returning to the White House on Monday from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, Mr. Trump stood on a White House balcony, removed his mask and flashed two thumbs up.

Biden said that he was glad Mr. Trump “seems to be coming along pretty well” but that he hoped the president would “communicate the right lesson to the American people: Masks matter.”

including Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc.’s experimental antibody drug cocktail

Mr. Trump’s physicians declined to answer several questions about the president’s case

“That’s crucial information,” he said. Without it, he said, it isn’t clear how badly the illness has affected him, particularly whether he contracted pneumonia. Mr. Trump’s early treatment with dexamethasone, which is typically given to people with more-severe breathing problems who are further along in the illness, raised questions, Dr. Chin-Hong said.

“As the current incidents have remained geographically isolated, we have made the decision to begin returning these products to the sales floor today,” the company said. 

“some isolated civil unrest” for the decision to put away the guns. A letter to store managers viewed by the Journal indicated that the instructions had been given on Wednesday.

Wallace, 27, was shot numerous times by Philadelphia officers after his mother called for help for a mental health crisis. Shaky cellphone video shows the officers demanding that Wallace, several yards from them, “put the knife down” before firing.

Walmart has been pushed to make adjustments to its firearms department after other incidents of violence.

In 2019, after 23 people were killed in a mass shooting at a Walmart in Texas, the retailer stopped selling ammunition for assault-style rifles. 

The waves of cases have touched members of Mr. Trump’s family, campaign, administration and staff, some of whom have not isolated for recommended periods after infection and have continued to flout basic coronavirus rules.