Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

Historians are uncertain whether this floating bridge to nowhere, for the sole purpose of Caligula joy-riding across it in pointless triumph, was ever actually built. They do however agree that it is evidence the emperor wasn’t playing with a full set of marbles. Some might discern a similarity between it and the $18 billion Mexican border wall we may be building, at a time of declining illegal border crossings.

So there it is, or as Suetonius might say, Res ipsa loquitur. Whatever the similarities, Mr. Trump certainly differs from “Little Boots” in one respect: Unlike the emperor, he hasn’t undergone a “momentous transformation.” The record indicates that he has always known he’s divine.As to how — on earth — we arrived at this point, here, perhaps, a note of consolation, in an earlier scene in “I, Claudius.” Caligula’s great-uncle Tiberius, another beauty of a Caesar, informs him: “I will make you my successor, Gaius Caligula. Rome deserves you.”

His great line was: “But Antony, who can tell where myth begins and truth ends?

The real problem is that the needs of history and the needs of the movie industry are fundamentally incompatible.

Hollywood has to simplify everything according to set formulae. Its films have to have heroes and, of course, baddies – moral equivocation is too complex. Feature films also have to have a whole range of staple ingredients if they are to make it through the financing, production and studio system to the box office.

One element is the “arc of character”, in which the leading actors have to go through a form of moral metamorphosis as a result of the experiences they undergo. Endings have to be upbeat, even for the Holocaust. Look at Schindler’s List and the sentimentality of its finale, revealing that in movies only the survivors count.

I still shake my head in disbelief when it is regularly voted the best war movie ever. It is nevertheless a work of intriguing paradoxes – some intended, others not. Steven Spielberg’s storyline rightly dramatises the clash between patriotic and therefore collective loyalty, and the struggle of the individual for survival. Those mutually contradictory values are, in many ways, the essence of war.

After a truly extraordinary opening – probably the most realistic battle sequence ever filmed – everything changes and becomes formulaic

Amid the horror of war, Spielberg seems to be trying to rediscover American innocence, that Holy Grail that existed only in the Rousseau-esque imagination yet was virtually incorporated into the constitution

Spielberg, like other Hollywood directors of the time, came from a generation scarred by the moral quagmire of Vietnam. He understood the national need, in the post-cold war chaos, to reach back to more certain times, seeking reassurance from that moment in history – the second world war – when the fight seemed unequivocally right.

This representative of American motherhood appears to be reassuring the US as a whole. She seems to be speaking to a nation unable at that time to come to terms with its role in a disordered world, to a nation that, for all its power, can be bewilderingly naive abroad because it so badly needs to feel good about itself at home.

Andrew Marr rightly called The Patriot, set in the American war of independence, “a stinker”. As he pointed out: “Black Americans, in fact destined to stay slaves thanks to the war, very many of whom enlisted with the British, are shown fighting shoulder to shoulder with their white rebel ‘brothers’. The British are portrayed as effete sadists and serial war criminals, just as in other American films. The huge support of the Bourbon French, who helped win the war, is airbrushed out. And the fact that most colonists actually sided with King George is airily forgotten.”

a national self-image certainly existed during the war and for some time afterwards. Perhaps that is partly why I do not react so angrily when watching films of that era. Also, they never used that weasel claim “based on a true story”

In a piece published in 2015 the editorial board of USA Today cautioned that such measures could impede investigative reporting and risked undermining other mitigating factors in attacks such as access to weapons.

Staff at the Washington Post also acknowledged their decision to share the videos had been hard."These are not easy decisions to make and we acknowledged notoriety concerns within the story itself. For each individual story, we must consider what is newsworthy," a spokeswoman said."In this case, the videos help readers better understand the life and thinking of the accused killer, which is relevant to his prosecution.

starting in late 1940, the Reimanns routinely took advantage of forced labor: men and women taken from their homes in Nazi-occupied territories, as well as prisoners of war, who were allocated by the Nazis to farms and industrial companies across Germany.

Mr. Harf noted that he lived in three places — New York, London and Milan — where nationalism and ethnic division were on the rise. For most of his long career, he said, he considered shareholder capitalism to be value neutral. No longer. In the age of Trump, Brexit and Matteo Salvini, he said, businesses can no longer pretend that they are operating in a “value-free space.”

“This is once again a time when everybody needs to take a stance,” Mr. Harf said. “I’m very scared of what’s happening.”

the men gave the company a makeover in keeping with Nazi principles. By the time Hitler took over, Benckiser already housed a Nationalist Socialist Company Organization — a worker council that sought to uphold Nazi ideology. It later became a “model NS plant.”

“Reimann Sr. and Reimann Jr. were not just opportunistic followers of the regime,” Mr. Harf said. “They were fully signed up to the Nazi project.”

In 1933, it employed 181 people. As an important supplier to the food industry, Benckiser benefited from the Nazi system, more than tripling sales over the next decade. Mr. Reimann Sr. served as president of the regional Chamber of Industry and Commerce, which helped orchestrate the Aryanization, expropriation and expulsion of Jewish businesses

Its employees — there are 180,000 around the world — have reported that customers accuse them of “working for Nazis

It was around this time that Emilie Landecker started working in the accounting department as a clerk

According to Mr. Harf, Benckiser’s use of forced laborers grew so fast that she would surely have been aware of the abuses.

By 1943, 175 people, or a third of the total work force, were forced laborers, most of them from France and Eastern Europe. Benckiser operated two labor camps, one of them overseen by a brutal foreman, Paul Werneburg, who had been with the company since 1910. On his watch, female workers were forced to stand at attention naked outside their barracks, and those who refused risked sexual abuse. Workers were kicked and beaten, among them a Ukrainian woman who also cleaned in the Reimanns’ private villa.

During a bomb raid on Jan. 7, 1945, Werneburg threw dozens of workers out of a camp bomb shelter. Thirty were injured, and one died. As word of Werneburg’s brutality spread, even the local Nazi office in charge of allocating forced laborers reprimanded the Reimanns for mistreating their workers.

Ms. Landecker would have witnessed it all, said her son, Wolfgang Reimann, in an email. “She lived through the horror show happening in our own company,” he said. “She probably sat in the very bunker when Werneburg threw out the workers.”

Mr. Reimann Jr. wrote a letter to the commanding officer on Sept. 22, dismissing allegations that he had been an “early and enthusiastic Nazi” as mere “denunciations” — and insisting that he was in fact a victim of the Nazis.

It worked. While the French initially barred Mr. Reimann Jr. from continuing his business activities, American officials overturned the judgment, classifying him as a “follower” of Nazism, rather than an active Nazi himself.

In 1947, the wealth of the Reimann family totaled 686,000 Reichsmark, or approximately $2.4 million in today’s money. Over the decades, the fortune grew in step with Benckiser and its successor companies, and today the family’s worth is estimated at €33 billion. On one recent list of the wealthiest families in Germany, the Reimanns ranked second.

Ms. Landecker was at work at Benckiser when the Gestapo came for her father.It was April 24, 1942

A few weeks later, one last letter arrived from Mr. Landecker, but only the envelope has survived. It shows that he was interned in block III 416/2 in Izbica, a ghetto serving as a transfer point for the deportation of Jews to the Belzec and Sobibor death camps in Nazi-occupied Poland.

Mr. Harf said it made him think that not enough voices in business were speaking up against the re-emergence of nationalism and populism in Europe and the United States.

“We fought for five years only to have an age like this,” he wrote, referring to World War I. “I hope you, my dear children, remain well-behaved and good, and keep loving me, even if you suffer because of me.”

he had a brother and sister-in-law. “Aunt Pauline has written from America,” he wrote that December. “She is trying for us, maybe things will work out.” But there wasn’t enough money. Mr. Landecker was not allowed to work, which meant that Emilie, still a teenager, became the family’s only earner.

he wrote his last letter to Bavaria.“My dear Gerdele,” he wrote. “As you can see, I’m still here, but not for long. Today I learned that my departure is on the 24th of the month — in two days. So this is the last letter that you receive from me from here or perhaps ever. We don’t know what is waiting for us.”

“You won’t be able to marry here in Germany,” he continued. “Learn languages!! You have your future ahead of you — don’t waste it.”

No one knows when exactly their love affair started. But in 1951, their first child was born

Two more followed. Twice a week, every Sunday and Wednesday, Mr. Reimann Jr. would leave his wife and visit Ms. Landecker.

years later, she admitted in a letter to Mr. Reimann Jr. that she always missed not being his wife — and not having a regular family

Ms. Landecker was a quiet woman. She did not speak much. But her children say that despite everything, she loved their father. “I never understood why,” said Wolfgang Reimann. “He was not very lovable from my perspective.”

“My mother never said anything,” Wolfgang Reimann said. “For the longest time, I believed it was her personality.” But he has changed his mind. “If I had to live with the love of my life, as my mother did, and this person was also responsible for the terrible things that happened during the war, I would not have spoken much, either, I guess,

the Reimanns channeled much of their wealth into JAB. In recent years the holding company has spent billions to become a rival to the likes of Starbucks and Nestlé by buying chains including Panera Bread, Krispy Kreme and Pret A Manger. Last year, it also helped Keurig Green Mountain buy Dr Pepper Snapple for nearly $19 billion. JAB also controls the cosmetics giant Coty, the owner of Calvin Klein fragrances

“When I heard and read of the atrocities committed at Benckiser, sanctioned by my grandfather, I felt like throwing up,” said Martin Reimann, 30, who is a grandchild to Ms. Landecker and Mr. Reimann Jr. “I cannot claim that I was very interested in politics before. I was just living my life. But after what happened, I changed my mind. I have to do something. In our family council, the younger generation created a little bit of a rebellion.”

By renaming its foundation after Alfred Landecker, the Reimann family is bringing back one name from the millions killed by the Nazis. But it is also explicitly linking the memory of crimes past to today’s fight to preserve the values of liberal democracy.

“What we can learn from history and how we can learn from history is at the core of this foundation,”

“This is not just about researching and remembering the past,” he added. “It’s about stabilizing and maintaining democracy today.”

Mr. Harf, JAB’s chairman, agrees. He said he had recently read “The Order of the Day,” a historic novella by Éric Vuillard set in the years before World War II. One scene takes place in February 1933, when Hitler and the president of the Reichstag encourage 24 German industrialists to donate to the Nazi party. The businessmen — representing companies that are still prominent German corporate names, like Siemens, Bayer and Allianz — duly open their wallets.

Mr. Landecker did two things that would prove prescient. He made sure his children were baptized Catholic, like his late wife. And he officially transferred to them his main possessions, including the family apartment, so that they could not be expropriated.

Every time business leaders make decisions, he said, they should ask, “What does this mean for our children? What does it mean for the future?”

“In history, businesses have enabled populists,” he added. “We mustn’t make the same mistake today.” Then he quoted the Holocaust survivor Simon Wiesenthal: “For evil to flourish, it only requires good men to do nothing.”

He added, “As the successors and descendants of people who committed horrendous acts, it is vital that our generation accepts what has happened, that we do whatever we can to bring tolerance and equality to the communities in which we live

The plan was published Sunday by the American Enterprise Institute. Its lead author — Scott Gottlieb, former Food and Drug Administration commissioner in the Trump administration

“The goal is to outline a plan that will allow a gradual return to a more normal way of life without increasing the risk” that the epidemic will resurge.

Most economists and health experts say there is no way to restart the economy without addressing the underlying problem of the coronavirus. As long as the pandemic continues to spread, the markets will be in turmoil and any businesses will struggle to stay open, they say.

instead of giving false reassurances and deadlines, the White House should tell people the hard truth about the current situation and a coherent strategy they can work toward. “The social distancing, being stuck at home, the deaths we’re going to be seeing. People want to know what it’s for. That there’s a plan.”

the road map Gottlieb’s group outlined stresses the need to move away from the current decentralized system and “toward more coordinated execution of response.”

The plan divides coming months into four phases and sets “triggers” for states to move from one phase to the next.

The latest proposal is a 19-page plan with a step-by-step timeline, with clear benchmarks states and regions would need to meet to safely move forward to the next step

With most of the nation now in phase one of the epidemic, the goal should be a sharp increase in hospital critical care beds and an increase of testing to 750,000 people a week to track the epidemic — a number Gottlieb said could be achieved in the next week or two.

For a state to move to phase two, it should see a sustained reduction in new cases for at least 14 days, and its hospitals need to be able to provide care without being overwhelmed.

“The reason we set it at 14 days is that’s the incubation period of the virus,” said Rivers of Johns Hopkins. “That way you know the downward trend is certain and not because of a holiday or blip or some other delay in reported cases.”

States that have moved into phase two would begin gradually lifting social distancing measures and opening schools and businesses, while increasing surveillance.

The key goals thereafter would be accelerating the development of new treatments and deploying tests to determine who has recovered from infection with some immunity and could rejoin the workforce.

Phase 3 occurs when the nation has a vaccine or drugs to treat covid-19 in place and the government launches mass vaccinations

For weeks, World Health Organization officials have stressed such lockdowns are only helpful for slowing down the virus and buying time to deploy more targeted and comprehensive measures, which the U.S. has not yet done.

Trump has repeatedly returned to strategies of bans and movement restriction

Phase 4 involves rebuilding the nation’s capacity to deal with the next pandemic by building up its scientific and public health infrastructure.

Mike Ryan, WHO head of emergency programs, recently urged countries to focus on finding and isolating infected people and their contacts. “It’s not just about physical distancing, it’s not just about locking down,”

Many experts’ recent proposals for a U.S. strategy have similar stressed the importance of large-scale contact tracing — because it was a cornerstone for successful efforts like South Korea and Singapore.

as countries have shown success with it against this coronavirus, that thinking has changed.

such contact tracing is “impractical now in many places but more practical once case numbers have been reduced and testing scaled up” and “could alleviate the need for stringent social distancing to maintain control of the epidemic.”

Rapidly building up that capacity — either with community volunteers or short-term hires — will be crucial in coming months, said Rivers of Johns Hopkins. “If you build capacity up and bring cases down, it starts looking a lot more possible.”

Many proposals tackle the problem of the tanking economy.

Gottlieb-Johns Hopkins plan, for example, calls for widespread use of blood tests to identify people who have had the infection and now are immune — called serology testing

People who are immune could return to work, or take on high-risk roles in the health care system and help people, especially the elderly, who are still quarantined at home.

Such serology tests have not been deployed before like this on such a large scale

during Ebola outbreaks in Africa, survivors were often the ones who provided care, watched over the children of sick patients and buried the dead.

One challenge unaddressed by most proposals and op-eds, however, is how to get such detailed plans adopted by the White House, whose response has weighed down by infighting and unclear leadership ping-ponging in recent weeks among Trump, Pence and health advisers like Anthony S. Fauci and Deborah Birx and others.

Health officials and scientists involved in the federal response, especially from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, have fought to be heard while straining to avoid offending Trump, who bristles at being publicly contradicted, undercut or overshadowed by praise for ideas or people beside himself, according to people who spoke on the condition of anonymity about sensitive deliberations.

On Thursday, Trump unveiled a plan of his own, though scarce in detail. He said he planned to help communities ease their restrictions and reopen for business by using on “robust” surveillance and categorizing counties across America into three “risk levels” — low, medium and high. More details are likely in coming days, White House officials said.

“According to our statistics, 90% of the causes of violence [in this period] are related to the Covid-19 epidemic.”

It is a pattern being repeated globally. In Brazil a state-run drop-in centre has already seen a surge in cases it attributes to coronavirus isolation

“We think there has been a rise of 40% or 50%, and there was already really big demand,”

Those alarming figures log only cases where women are able to seek help; many cannot make calls because they fear being overheard by abusive partners, or are stopped from leaving home.

In Italy activists said calls to helplines had dropped sharply, but instead they were receiving desperate text messages and emails.

“For sure there is an overwhelming emergency right now. There is more desperation as women can’t go out.”

In Spain – where lockdown rules are extremely strict, and many people are being fined for breaking them – the government has told women they will not be fined if they leave home to report abuse.

But on 19 March, the country saw the first domestic violence fatality since the lockdown began five days earlier, when a woman was murdered by her husband in front of their children in the coastal province of Valencia.

The increased threat to women and children was a predictable side effect of the coronavirus lockdowns, said activists. Increased abuse is a pattern repeated in many emergencies, whether conflict, economic crisis or during disease outbreaks, although the quarantine rules pose a particularly grave challenge.

“It happens in all crisis situations,” said Marcy Hersh, a senior manager for humanitarian advocacy at Women Deliver. “What we worry about is just as rates of violence are on the rise, the accessibility of services and the ability of women to access these services will decrease. This is a real challenge.”

A prosecutor in Trento, Italy, has ruled that in situations of domestic violence the abuser must leave the family home and not the victim, a decision hailed as “fundamental” by the trade union CGIL.

In Germany the Green party’s parliamentary leader, Katrin Göring-Eckardt, said this week she feared for the lives of thousands of women trapped with violent partners, and called on the government to free up money for safe houses.

In Greece, officials said they were stepping up a campaign to help women deal with problems clearly emerging from the issue of confinement.

To contain such a pathogen, nations must develop a test and use it to identify infected people, isolate them, and trace those they’ve had contact with. That is what South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong did to tremendous effect. It is what the United States did not.

That a biomedical powerhouse like the U.S. should so thoroughly fail to create a very simple diagnostic test was, quite literally, unimaginable. “I’m not aware of any simulations that I or others have run where we [considered] a failure of testing,”

The testing fiasco was the original sin of America’s pandemic failure, the single flaw that undermined every other countermeasure. If the country could have accurately tracked the spread of the virus, hospitals could have executed their pandemic plans, girding themselves by allocating treatment rooms, ordering extra supplies, tagging in personnel, or assigning specific facilities to deal with COVID-19 cases.

None of that happened. Instead, a health-care system that already runs close to full capacity, and that was already challenged by a severe flu season, was suddenly faced with a virus that had been left to spread, untracked, through communities around the country.

With little room to surge during a crisis, America’s health-care system operates on the assumption that unaffected states can help beleaguered ones in an emergency.

That ethic works for localized disasters such as hurricanes or wildfires, but not for a pandemic that is now in all 50 states. Cooperation has given way to competition

Partly, that’s because the White House is a ghost town of scientific expertise. A pandemic-preparedness office that was part of the National Security Council was dissolved in 2018. On January 28, Luciana Borio, who was part of that team, urged the government to “act now to prevent an American epidemic,” and specifically to work with the private sector to develop fast, easy diagnostic tests. But with the office shuttered, those warnings were published in The Wall Street Journal, rather than spoken into the president’s ear.

Rudderless, blindsided, lethargic, and uncoordinated, America has mishandled the COVID-19 crisis to a substantially worse degree than what every health expert I’ve spoken with had feared. “Much worse,”

“Beyond any expectations we had,” said Lauren Sauer, who works on disaster preparedness at Johns Hopkins Medicine. “As an American, I’m horrified,” said Seth Berkley, who heads Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. “The U.S. may end up with the worst outbreak in the industrialized world.”

it will be difficult—but not impossible—for the United States to catch up. To an extent, the near-term future is set because COVID-19 is a slow and long illness. People who were infected several days ago will only start showing symptoms now, even if they isolated themselves in the meantime. Some of those people will enter intensive-care units in early April

A “massive logistics and supply-chain operation [is] now needed across the country,” says Thomas Inglesby of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. That can’t be managed by small and inexperienced teams scattered throughout the White House. The solution, he says, is to tag in the Defense Logistics Agency—a 26,000-person group that prepares the U.S. military for overseas operations and that has assisted in past public-health crises, including the 2014 Ebola outbreak.

The first and most important is to rapidly produce masks, gloves, and other personal protective equipment

it would also come at a terrible cost: SARS-CoV-2 is more transmissible and fatal than the flu, and it would likely leave behind many millions of corpses and a trail of devastated health systems.

This agency can also coordinate the second pressing need: a massive rollout of COVID-19 tests.

These measures will take time, during which the pandemic will either accelerate beyond the capacity of the health system or slow to containable levels. Its course—and the nation’s fate—now depends on the third need, which is social distancing.

There are now only two groups of Americans. Group A includes everyone involved in the medical response, whether that’s treating patients, running tests, or manufacturing supplies. Group B includes everyone else, and their job is to buy Group A more time. Group B must now “flatten the curve” by physically isolating themselves from other people to cut off chains of transmission.

Given the slow fuse of COVID-19, to forestall the future collapse of the health-care system, these seemingly drastic steps must be taken immediately, before they feel proportionate, and they must continue for several weeks.

Persuading a country to voluntarily stay at home is not easy, and without clear guidelines from the White House, mayors, governors, and business owners have been forced to take their own steps.

when the good of all hinges on the sacrifices of many, clear coordination matters—the fourth urgent need

Pundits and business leaders have used similar rhetoric, arguing that high-risk people, such as the elderly, could be protected while lower-risk people are allowed to go back to work. Such thinking is seductive, but flawed. It overestimates our ability to assess a person’s risk, and to somehow wall off the ‘high-risk’ people from the rest of society. It underestimates how badly the virus can hit ‘low-risk’ groups, and how thoroughly hospitals will be overwhelmed if even just younger demographics are falling sick.

A recent analysis from the University of Pennsylvania estimated that even if social-distancing measures can reduce infection rates by 95 percent, 960,000 Americans will still need intensive care.

There are only about 180,000 ventilators in the U.S. and, more pertinently, only enough respiratory therapists and critical-care staff to safely look after 100,000 ventilated patients. Abandoning social distancing would be foolish. Abandoning it now, when tests and protective equipment are still scarce, would be catastrophic.

If Trump stays the course, if Americans adhere to social distancing, if testing can be rolled out, and if enough masks can be produced, there is a chance that the country can still avert the worst predictions about COVID-19, and at least temporarily bring the pandemic under control. No one knows how long that will take, but it won’t be quick. “It could be anywhere from four to six weeks to up to three months,” Fauci said, “but I don’t have great confidence in that range.”

there are three possible endgames: one that’s very unlikely, one that’s very dangerous, and one that’s very long.

The first is that every nation manages to simultaneously bring the virus to heel, as with the original SARS in 2003. Given how widespread the coronavirus pandemic is, and how badly many countries are faring, the odds of worldwide synchronous control seem vanishingly small.

The second is that the virus does what past flu pandemics have done: It burns through the world and leaves behind enough immune survivors that it eventually struggles to find viable hosts. This “herd immunity” scenario would be quick, and thus tempting

The U.S. has fewer hospital beds per capita than Italy. A study released by a team at Imperial College London concluded that if the pandemic is left unchecked, those beds will all be full by late April. By the end of June, for every available critical-care bed, there will be roughly 15 COVID-19 patients in need of one.  By the end of the summer, the pandemic will have directly killed 2.2 million Americans,

The third scenario is that the world plays a protracted game of whack-a-mole with the virus, stamping out outbreaks here and there until a vaccine can be produced. This is the best option, but also the longest and most complicated.

there are no existing vaccines for coronaviruses—until now, these viruses seemed to cause diseases that were mild or rare—so researchers must start from scratch.

The first steps have been impressively quick. Last Monday, a possible vaccine created by Moderna and the National Institutes of Health went into early clinical testing. That marks a 63-day gap between scientists sequencing the virus’s genes for the first time and doctors injecting a vaccine candidate into a person’s arm. “It’s overwhelmingly the world record,” Fauci said.

The initial trial will simply tell researchers if the vaccine seems safe, and if it can actually mobilize the immune system. Researchers will then need to check that it actually prevents infection from SARS-CoV-2. They’ll need to do animal tests and large-scale trials to ensure that the vaccine doesn’t cause severe side effects. They’ll need to work out what dose is required, how many shots people need, if the vaccine works in elderly people, and if it requires other chemicals to boost its effectiveness.

No matter which strategy is faster, Berkley and others estimate that it will take 12 to 18 months to develop a proven vaccine, and then longer still to make it, ship it, and inject it into people’s arms.

as the status quo returns, so too will the virus. This doesn’t mean that society must be on continuous lockdown until 2022. But “we need to be prepared to do multiple periods of social distancing,” says Stephen Kissler of Harvard.

First: seasonality. Coronaviruses tend to be winter infections that wane or disappear in the summer. That may also be true for SARS-CoV-2, but seasonal variations might not sufficiently slow the virus when it has so many immunologically naive hosts to infect.

Second: duration of immunity. When people are infected by the milder human coronaviruses that cause cold-like symptoms, they remain immune for less than a year. By contrast, the few who were infected by the original SARS virus, which was far more severe, stayed immune for much longer.

scientists will need to develop accurate serological tests, which look for the antibodies that confer immunity. They’ll also need to confirm that such antibodies actually stop people from catching or spreading the virus. If so, immune citizens can return to work, care for the vulnerable, and anchor the economy during bouts of social distancing.

Aspects of America’s identity may need rethinking after COVID-19. Many of the country’s values have seemed to work against it during the pandemic. Its individualism, exceptionalism, and tendency to equate doing whatever you want with an act of resistance meant that when it came time to save lives and stay indoors, some people flocked to bars and clubs.

“We can keep schools and businesses open as much as possible, closing them quickly when suppression fails, then opening them back up again once the infected are identified and isolated. Instead of playing defense, we could play more offense.”

The vaccine may need to be updated as the virus changes, and people may need to get revaccinated on a regular basis, as they currently do for the flu. Models suggest that the virus might simmer around the world, triggering epidemics every few years or so. “But my hope and expectation is that the severity would decline, and there would be less societal upheaval,”

After infections begin ebbing, a secondary pandemic of mental-health problems will follow.

But “there is also the potential for a much better world after we get through this trauma,”

Testing kits can be widely distributed to catch the virus’s return as quickly as possible. There’s no reason that the U.S. should let SARS-CoV-2 catch it unawares again, and thus no reason that social-distancing measures need to be deployed as broadly and heavy-handedly as they now must be.

Pandemics can also catalyze social change. People, businesses, and institutions have been remarkably quick to adopt or call for practices that they might once have dragged their heels on, including working from home, conference-calling to accommodate people with disabilities, proper sick leave, and flexible child-care arrangements.

Perhaps the nation will learn that preparedness isn’t just about masks, vaccines, and tests, but also about fair labor policies and a stable and equal health-care system. Perhaps it will appreciate that health-care workers and public-health specialists compose America’s social immune system, and that this system has been suppressed.

Attitudes to health may also change for the better. The rise of HIV and AIDS “completely changed sexual behavior among young people who were coming into sexual maturity at the height of the epidemic,”

Years of isolationist rhetoric had consequences too.

“People believed the rhetoric that containment would work,” says Wendy Parmet, who studies law and public health at Northeastern University. “We keep them out, and we’ll be okay. When you have a body politic that buys into these ideas of isolationism and ethnonationalism, you’re especially vulnerable when a pandemic hits.”

Pandemics are democratizing experiences. People whose privilege and power would normally shield them from a crisis are facing quarantines, testing positive, and losing loved ones. Senators are falling sick. The consequences of defunding public-health agencies, losing expertise, and stretching hospitals are no longer manifesting as angry opinion pieces, but as faltering lungs.

After COVID-19, attention may shift to public health. Expect to see a spike in funding for virology and vaccinology, a surge in students applying to public-health programs, and more domestic production of medical supplies.

The lessons that America draws from this experience are hard to predict, especially at a time when online algorithms and partisan broadcasters only serve news that aligns with their audience’s preconceptions.

“The transitions after World War II or 9/11 were not about a bunch of new ideas,” he says. “The ideas are out there, but the debates will be more acute over the next few months because of the fluidity of the moment and willingness of the American public to accept big, massive changes.”

One could easily conceive of a world in which most of the nation believes that America defeated COVID-19. Despite his many lapses, Trump’s approval rating has surged. Imagine that he succeeds in diverting blame for the crisis to China, casting it as the villain and America as the resilient hero.

One could also envisage a future in which America learns a different lesson. A communal spirit, ironically born through social distancing, causes people to turn outward, to neighbors both foreign and domestic. The election of November 2020 becomes a repudiation of “America first” politics. The nation pivots, as it did after World War II, from isolationism to international cooperation

The U.S. leads a new global partnership focused on solving challenges like pandemics and climate change.

In 2030, SARS-CoV-3 emerges from nowhere, and is brought to heel within a month.

On the Global Health Security Index, a report card that grades every country on its pandemic preparedness, the United States has a score of 83.5—the world’s highest. Rich, strong, developed, America is supposed to be the readiest of nations. That illusion has been shattered. Despite months of advance warning as the virus spread in other countries, when America was finally tested by COVID-19, it failed.

But often, what the people want is not what the society needs. Politicians and voters crave immediate gratification, when patience and self-restraint may deliver more long-term benefits.

Nothing worked. The main reason was simple: Both political parties were unwilling to maintain harsh economic policies — meaning high unemployment and interest rates — long enough to squeeze inflationary expectations.

The social cost of purging inflation was enormous and highly unpopular. Congress was outraged. Volcker and Reagan were vilified. But perpetual stagflation — a permanent mix of high inflation and joblessness — would have been worse.

That is where we find ourselves today. All our choices are bad. The lockdowns in many states are harsh and personally unpleasant. There is no guarantee that they will ultimately succeed in exterminating the coronavirus.

Doubtlessly, most Americans share the president’s impatience and would be thrilled if new policies revived the economy and repressed the virus. But if this could be done easily, it would already have been done

The outcome could be the worst of both worlds: The economy doesn’t flourish, and the virus does.

It’s true that, in the long run, there is no conflict between suppressing the virus and mending the economy. The economy can’t be healthy if many millions struggle with the disease and others worry

But in the short run, reviving the economy is at odds with suppressing the virus. The standard treatment is isolation, either as social distancing or ­quarantining.

Ideally, increased testing would enable medical teams to identify and isolate all cases, but this prospect depends on having enough health-care personnel, supplies and tests — propositions that are in doubt.

Whatever happens, the future looks tortuous. Jha thinks that we may be grappling with the coronavirus for the next year or 18 months — that is, until a vaccine is deployed or until so many people have contracted the disease that society has effectively developed mass immunity. Typically, survivors generate antibodies against the disease.

The danger of prematurely relaxing the lockdowns and quarantines is that the virus soars. Little will have been gained

Success requires public understandings of the difficult choices that are involved. Trump should serve as the explainer in chief.

But preoccupied by his own political future, he is hardly a model of courageous clarity.

The larger issue is that politics in democracies are inevitably skewed toward short-term outcomes, not long-term gains. This is a condition that, regardless of how the coronavirus drama turns out, should engage us all.

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

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

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

More Americans may die than the White House admits.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The lockdowns will end, but haltingly.

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

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

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

Every epidemiological model envisions something like the dance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Immunity will become a societal advantage.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Still, experts were divided on the idea of such wards

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

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

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

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

There will not be a vaccine soon.

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

the record is four years, for the mumps vaccine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Treatments are likely to arrive first.

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

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

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

Goodbye, ‘America First.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the coronavirus more often infects clusters of family members, friends and work colleagues,

“You can contain clusters,” Dr. Heymann said. “You need to identify and stop discrete outbreaks, and then do rigorous contact tracing.”

The microphone should not even be at the White House, scientists said, so that briefings of historic importance do not dissolve into angry, politically charged exchanges with the press corps, as happened again on Friday.

Americans must be persuaded to stay home, they said, and a system put in place to isolate the infected and care for them outside the home

Travel restrictions should be extended, they said; productions of masks and ventilators must be accelerated, and testing problems must be resolved.

It was not at all clear that a nation so fundamentally committed to individual liberty and distrustful of government could learn to adapt to many of these measures, especially those that smack of state compulsion.

What follows are the recommendations offered by the experts interviewed by The Times.

they were united in the opinion that politicians must step aside and let scientists both lead the effort to contain the virus and explain to Americans what must be done.

medical experts should be at the microphone now to explain complex ideas like epidemic curves, social distancing and off-label use of drugs.

doing so takes intelligent, rapidly adaptive work by health officials, and near-total cooperation from the populace. Containment becomes realistic only when Americans realize that working together is the only way to protect themselves and their loved ones.

Above all, the experts said, briefings should focus on saving lives and making sure that average wage earners survive the coming hard times — not on the stock market, the tourism industry or the president’s health.

“At this point in the emergency, there’s little merit in spending time on what we should have done or who’s at fault,”

The next priority, experts said, is extreme social distancing.If it were possible to wave a magic wand and make all Americans freeze in place for 14 days while sitting six feet apart, epidemiologists say, the whole epidemic would sputter to a halt.

The virus would die out on every contaminated surface and, because almost everyone shows symptoms within two weeks, it would be evident who was infected. If we had enough tests for every American, even the completely asymptomatic cases could be found and isolated.

The crisis would be over.

Obviously, there is no magic wand, and no 300 million tests. But the goal of lockdowns and social distancing is to approximate such a total freeze.

In contrast to the halting steps taken here, China shut down Wuhan — the epicenter of the nation’s outbreak — and restricted movement in much of the country on Jan. 23, when the country had a mere 500 cases and 17 deaths.Its rapid action had an important effect: With the virus mostly isolated in one province, the rest of China was able to save Wuhan.

Even as many cities fought their own smaller outbreaks, they sent 40,000 medical workers into Wuhan, roughly doubling its medical force.

Stop transmission within cities

the weaker the freeze, the more people die in overburdened hospitals — and the longer it ultimately takes for the economy to restart.

People in lockdown adapt. In Wuhan, apartment complexes submit group orders for food, medicine, diapers and other essentials. Shipments are assembled at grocery warehouses or government pantries and dropped off. In Italy, trapped neighbors serenade one another.

Each day’s delay in stopping human contact, experts said, creates more hot spots, none of which can be identified until about a week later, when the people infected there start falling ill.

South Korea avoided locking down any city, but only by moving early and with extraordinary speed. In January, the country had four companies making tests, and as of March 9 had tested 210,000 citizens — the equivalent of testing 2.3 million Americans.

As of the same date, fewer than 9,000 Americans had been tested.

Fix the testing mess

Testing must be done in a coordinated and safe way, experts said. The seriously ill must go first, and the testers must be protected.In China, those seeking a test must describe their symptoms on a telemedicine website. If a nurse decides a test is warranted, they are directed to one of dozens of “fever clinics” set up far from all other patients.

Isolate the infected

As soon as possible, experts said, the United States must develop an alternative to the practice of isolating infected people at home, as it endangers families. In China, 75 to 80 percent of all transmission occurred in family clusters.

Cellphone videos from China show police officers knocking on doors and taking temperatures. In some, people who resist are dragged away by force. The city of Ningbo offered bounties of $1,400 to anyone who turned in a coronavirus sufferer.

In China, said Dr. Bruce Aylward, leader of the World Health Organization’s observer team there, people originally resisted leaving home or seeing their children go into isolation centers with no visiting rights — just as Americans no doubt would.

In China, they came to accept it.“They realized they were keeping their families safe,” he said. “Also, isolation is really lonely. It’s psychologically difficult. Here, they were all together with other people in the same boat. They supported each other.”

Find the fevers

Make masks ubiquitous

In China, having a fever means a mandatory trip to a fever clinic to check for coronavirus. In the Wuhan area, different cities took different approaches.

In most cities in affected Asian countries, it is commonplace before entering any bus, train or subway station, office building, theater or even a restaurant to get a temperature check. Washing your hands in chlorinated water is often also required.

The city of Qianjiang, by contrast, offered the same amount of money to any resident who came in voluntarily and tested positive

Voluntary approaches, like explaining to patients that they will be keeping family and friends safe, are more likely to work in the West, she added.

Trace the contacts

Finding and testing all the contacts of every positive case is essential, experts said. At the peak of its epidemic, Wuhan had 18,000 people tracking down individuals who had come in contact with the infected.

Dr. Borio suggested that young Americans could use their social networks to “do their own contact tracing.” Social media also is used in Asia, but in different ways

When he lectured at a Singapore university, Dr. Heymann said, dozens of students were in the room. But just before he began class, they were photographed to record where everyone sat.

Instead of a policy that advises the infected to remain at home, as the Centers for Disease and Prevention now does, experts said cities should establish facilities where the mildly and moderately ill can recuperate under the care and observation of nurses.

There is very little data showing that flat surgical masks protect healthy individuals from disease. Nonetheless, Asian countries generally make it mandatory that people wear them.

The Asian approach is less about data than it is about crowd psychology, experts explained.All experts agree that the sick must wear masks to keep in their coughs. But if a mask indicates that the wearer is sick, many people will be reluctant to wear one. If everyone is required to wear masks, the sick automatically have one on and there is no stigma attached.

Also, experts emphasized, Americans should be taught to take seriously admonitions to stop shaking hands and hugging

Preserve vital services

Only the federal government can enforce interstate commerce laws to ensure that food, water, electricity, gas, phone lines and other basic needs keep flowing across state lines to cities and suburbs

“I sense that most people — and certainly those in business — get it. They would prefer to take the bitter medicine at once and contain outbreaks as they start rather than gamble with uncertainty.”

Produce ventilators and oxygen

The manufacturers, including a dozen in the United States, say there is no easy way to ramp up production quickly. But it is possible other manufacturers, including aerospace and automobile companies, could be enlisted to do so.

Canadian nurses are disseminating a 2006 paper describing how one ventilator can be modified to treat four patients simultaneously. Inventors have proposed combining C-PAP machines, which many apnea sufferers own, and oxygen tanks to improvise a ventilator.

One of the lessons of China, he noted, was that many Covid-19 patients who would normally have been intubated and on ventilators managed to survive with oxygen alone.

Retrofit hospitals

In Wuhan, the Chinese government famously built two new hospitals in two weeks. All other hospitals were divided: 48 were designated to handle 10,000 serious or critical coronavirus patients, while others were restricted to handling emergencies like heart attacks and births.

Wherever that was impractical, hospitals were divided into “clean” and “dirty” zones, and the medical teams did not cross over. Walls to isolate whole wards were built

Decide when to close schools

Recruit volunteers

China’s effort succeeded, experts said, in part because of hundreds of thousands of volunteers. The government declared a “people’s war” and rolled out a “Fight On, Wuhan! Fight On, China!” campaign.

Many people idled by the lockdowns stepped up to act as fever checkers, contact tracers, hospital construction workers, food deliverers, even babysitters for the children of first responders, or as crematory workers.

“In my experience, success is dependent on how much the public is informed and participates,” Admiral Ziemer said. “This truly is an ‘all hands on deck’ situation.”

Prioritize the treatments

Clinicians in China, Italy and France have thrown virtually everything they had in hospital pharmacies into the fight, and at least two possibilities have emerged that might save patients: the anti-malaria drugs chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, and the antiviral remdesivir, which has no licensed use.

An alternative is to harvest protective antibodies from the blood of people who have survived the illness,

The purified blood serum — called immunoglobulin — could possibly be used in small amounts to protect emergency medical workers, too.

“Unfortunately, the first wave won’t benefit from this,” Dr. Hotez said. “We need to wait until we have enough survivors.”Find a vaccine

testing those candidate vaccines for safety and effectiveness takes time.

The roadblock, vaccine experts explained, is not bureaucratic. It is that the human immune system takes weeks to produce antibodies, and some dangerous side effects can take weeks to appear.

After extensive animal testing, vaccines are normally given to about 50 healthy human volunteers to see if they cause any unexpected side effects and to measure what dose produces enough antibodies to be considered protective.

If that goes well, the trial enrolls hundreds or thousands of volunteers in an area where the virus is circulating. Half get the vaccine, the rest do not — and the investigators wait. If the vaccinated half do not get the disease, the green light for production is finally given.

In the past, some experimental vaccines have produced serious side effects, like Guillain-Barre syndrome, which can paralyze and kill. A greater danger, experts said, is that some experimental vaccines, paradoxically, cause “immune enhancement,” meaning they make it more likely, not less, that recipients will get a disease. That would be a disaster.

One candidate coronavirus vaccine Dr. Hotez invented 10 years ago in the wake of SARS, he said, had to be abandoned when it appeared to make mice more likely to die from pneumonia when they were experimentally infected with the virus.

Reach out to other nations

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’s more, even if it is determined that reinfection cannot occur shortly after recovery, it could still happen later if immunity is only seasonal

If reinfection is indeed possible, we need to know whether it will result in disease that is milder or more severe.

While antibodies to a previous infection generally reduce risk the second time around, for some viruses, such as dengue fever, they can lead to severe and even fatal disease.

3. The virus could continue living inside youWe don’t know that recovered patients actually clear the virus from their bodies. Many viruses can remain in reservoirs, parts of the body where they hang out quietly, and re-emerge to cause disease later in life

We now know that in some patients, detectable virus can be found in feces and even blood after apparent recovery. Does the coronavirus remain in the body, or are these just residual bits of virus?

2. Reinfection could be possibleThere are documented cases where people who appear to recover from the virus test positive again, which calls even short-term immunity into question.

5. Survivors could suffer long-term damage

We do know that previously healthy people are being left with potentially long-term lung and heart damage.

6. A ‘mild’ case is hardly mildAs more patients recount enduring painful coughing, disorientation and difficulties breathing, people are coming to understand that the 80 percent to 85 percent of cases considered mild are not necessarily “mild” in its usual sense

7. There’s no shortcut to immunityHerd immunity requires a high proportion of a population to be immune (the actual percentage varies for different infections), but we want to get there slowly or, ideally, through vaccines

Slowing down the spread of the coronavirus won’t just save lives in the coming few months; it also gives us time to study treatments, and to expand or reconfigure hospital services for Covid-19 patients.

We need to keep in mind that the science is moving fast right now. It is unprecedented to see such an intensive effort internationally being put into studying one disease.

While it is hard to be patient, the best way out of this will likely be much clearer to us in a month or two than it is now

Like Pétain, Trump collaborated with the invader and abandoned his country to a prolonged disaster. And, like France in 1940, America in 2020 has stunned itself with a collapse that’s larger and deeper than one miserable leader. Some future autopsy of the pandemic might be called Strange Defeat, after the historian and Resistance fighter Marc Bloch’s contemporaneous study of the fall of France.

Russia, Taiwan, and the United Nations sent humanitarian aid to the world’s richest power—a beggar nation in utter chaos.

he administration squandered two irretrievable months to prepare. From the president came willful blindness, scapegoating, boasts, and lies. From his mouthpieces, conspiracy theories and miracle cures. A few senators and corporate executives acted quickly—not to prevent the coming disaster, but to profit from it. When a government doctor tried to warn the public of the danger, the White House took the mic and politicized the message.

it should force a question that most Americans have never had to ask: Do we trust our leaders and one another enough to summon a collective response to a mortal threat? Are we still capable of self-government?

This is the third major crisis of the short 21st century. The first, on September 11, 2001, came when Americans were still living mentally in the previous century, and the memory of depression, world war, and cold war remained strong.

Partisan politics and terrible policies, especially the Iraq War, erased the sense of national unity and fed a bitterness toward the political class that never really faded. The second crisis, in 2008, intensified i

This second crisis drove a profound wedge between Americans: between the upper and lower classes, Republicans and Democrats, metropolitan and rural people, the native-born and immigrants, ordinary Americans and their leaders

The reforms of the Obama years, important as they were—in health care, financial regulation, green energy—had only palliative effects. The long recovery over the past decade enriched corporations and investors, lulled professionals, and left the working class further behind. The lasting effect of the slump was to increase polarization and to discredit authority, especially government’s.

Trump came to power as the repudiation of the Republican establishment. But the conservative political class and the new leader soon reached an understanding. Whatever their differences on issues like trade and immigration, they shared a basic goal: to strip-mine public assets for the benefit of private interests.

Like a wanton boy throwing matches in a parched field, Trump began to immolate what was left of national civic life. He never even pretended to be president of the whole country, but pitted us against one another along lines of race, sex, religion, citizenship, education, region, and—every day of his presidency—political party

His main tool of governance was to lie. A third of the country locked itself in a hall of mirrors that it believed to be reality; a third drove itself mad with the effort to hold on to the idea of knowable truth; and a third gave up even trying.

Trump acquired a federal government crippled by years of right-wing ideological assault, politicization by both parties, and steady defunding. He set about finishing off the job and destroying the professional civil service. He drove out some of the most talented and experienced career officials, left essential positions unfilled, and installed loyalists as commissars over the cowed survivors, with one purpose: to serve his own interests

If lying was his means for using power, corruption was his end

This was the American landscape that lay open to the virus: in prosperous cities, a class of globally connected desk workers dependent on a class of precarious and invisible service workers; in the countryside, decaying communities in revolt against the modern world; on social media, mutual hatred and endless vituperation among different camps; in the economy, even with full employment, a large and growing gap between triumphant capital and beleaguered labor; in Washington, an empty government led by a con man and his intellectually bankrupt party; around the country, a mood of cynical exhaustion, with no vision of a shared identity or future.

The virus also should have been a great leveler. You don’t have to be in the military or in debt to be a target—you just have to be human. But from the start, its effects have been skewed by the inequality that we’ve tolerated for so long

An internet joke proposed that the only way to find out whether you had the virus was to sneeze in a rich person’s face.

Who have the essential workers turned out to be? Mostly people in low-paying jobs that require their physical presence and put their health directly at risk: warehouse workers, shelf-stockers, Instacart shoppers, delivery drivers, municipal employees, hospital staffers, home health aides, long-haul truckers

An order of organic baby arugula on AmazonFresh is cheap and arrives overnight in part because the people who grow it, sort it, pack it, and deliver it have to keep working while sick. For most service workers, sick leave turns out to be an impossible luxury. It’s worth asking if we would accept a higher price and slower delivery so that they could stay home.

It turns out that everything has a cost, and years of attacking government, squeezing it dry and draining its morale, inflict a heavy cost that the public has to pay in lives. All the programs defunded, stockpiles depleted, and plans scrapped meant that we had become a second-rate nation.

putting an end to this regime, so necessary and deserved, is only the beginning.

We can learn from these dreadful days that stupidity and injustice are lethal; that, in a democracy, being a citizen is essential work; that the alternative to solidarity is death. After we’ve come out of hiding and taken off our masks, we should not forget what it was like to be alone.

The changed voting patterns specifically appeared to boost Nazis over other movements, the paper said. “The same patterns were not observable for the votes won by other extremist parties, such as the communists.”

Nazis got an electoral boost out of the pandemic in part from who was hit. Younger people fared worse in that crisis, and that “may also have spurred resentment of foreigners among the survivors (as has happened in past pandemics), driving voters towards parties whose platform matched such sentiments.”

The effect was also stronger in areas where anti-Jewish sentiment had deep roots. “The correlation between influenza mortality and the vote share won by right-wing extremists is stronger in regions that had historically blamed minorities, particularly Jews, for medieval plagues,”