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Scientists have detected the virus in places that can be reached only by air, such as ductwork; asymptomatic transmission is occurring, meaning people are spreading this without coughing or sneezing large droplets; and basic aerosol physics shows that people shed an entire continuum of particles when they cough, sneeze or talk, including large particles that settle out quickly and smaller ones that stay afloat for hours.

Why is airborne transmission so important? One reason: super-spreader events. Covid-19 does not spread from one person to the next equally.

one recent paper found that 10 percent of cases led to about 80 percent of the spread.

Such super-spreader events appear to be happening exclusively indoors, where airborne transmission is more likely.

when people sing, they emit as many aerosol particles as they do when they’re coughing. The practice also happened from 6:30 to 9 p.m., when most buildings turn off their ventilation systems.

it also requires that we minimize exposure to airborne pathogens, especially indoors.

To do that, we need to do two things. First, maintain physical distancing. Six feet is good, but 10 feet is better

Second, we must deploy healthy building strategies, such as refreshing stale indoor air.

We do this by opening windows in our homes and cars and by increasing the outdoor air ventilation rate in buildings with HVAC systems

We also have to make sure places such as bathrooms and rooms with infected patients have enough exhaust, and are negatively pressurized relative to common areas, so any airborne virus is confined to limited areas.

Florence Nightingale said, "Cleanliness and fresh air from open windows, with unremitting attention to the patient are the only defence a true nurse either asks or needs."

Just looking at these next few statistics will tell you everything you need to know about where we need to target our intervention efforts

One in 3 deaths nationally are workers or residents of senior homes; nine of the top 10 clusters in the United States occur in meatpacking plants and prisons; the death rate in hot spots is 10-fold higher in areas with lower incomes; and communities of color have nearly five times the odds of infection.

One thinks, too, of Bill Clinton traveling to Oklahoma City after the bombing there of a federal building in 1995. Clinton, like Reagan, was at his best when he captured tangled emotions and gave meaning to deaths of some of our finest citizens. He not only consoled families in private but moved the nation when he mourned them publicly. As I recall, that's when presidents were first called "Mourners in Chief" -- a phrase that has been applied repeatedly to presidents since. (Not coincidentally, Clinton's speech of mourning in Oklahoma City is widely credited with resurrecting his presidency, then in the doldrums.)

Historians generally agree that Washington, Lincoln and FDR were our greatest presidents. All three are remembered for their empathy and steadfastness in caring for the lives of average Americans. They continue to set the standard.

Lincoln began his presidency during great uncertainty about his leadership. He won the election of 1860 with the smallest plurality ever (39%), and his military experience was virtually nil. But over time, he kindled a special relationship with Union soldiers, many of whom called him "Father Abraham." Historians say his homespun ways, common manner and kindly empathy converted them. In his re-election, soldiers were his greatest supporters.

Why has our current "Mourner in Chief" gone AWOL? God knows. But his flight from responsibility is yet another sadness among this week's tragic losses.

The second is the assumption of personal innocence — the belief that because an individual is not personally at fault for segregation, redlining and police abuses, he or she is not obligated to address their legacy.

This is a particularly absurd view for conservatives, given their traditional belief that the past has a powerful hold on the present. For most of American history, deeply unjust laws meant that police enforced an oppressive social order, sometimes through tactics of terror.

The third is the assumption of historical irrelevance — the belief that if subjugation did not take place this morning, it is morally extraneous

This amounts to a selfish rejection of the common good, as well as a denial of the Golden Rule.

It is extraordinary that a group of people who came to our country in chains came to understand the essence of Christianity and the essence of our country far better than their oppressors. You might even call it providential.

these statements are an apt description of much of American life since Gen Z was born. It has been witness to a financial crisis that deferred or destroyed dreams and wealth with little consequence to those who caused it; the whiplash of the Obama and Trump presidencies; political gridlock; an information ecosystem built atop viral advertising platforms that have democratized information, allowing it to be weaponized to the point of blurring reality; seemingly endless digitally documented police violence; and forever wars. They were born into a time of stark and widening inequality, a time when voter suppression is both called out but rarely acted upon.

Alienation is not a feature of Gen Z experience — it is the overarching context.

it is likely to have profound impacts on their politics and all of our lives.

What, for example, are the results of a year or two of young adulthood lost to social distancing due to a pandemic? Or of graduating into a potential economic depression behind a generation that graduated into a recession?

“ … older generations of liberals are now talking about teens and Kpop fans in the same way that Trump boomers talk about 4chan: as vigilante forces they love but don’t understand.”

Keidra Chaney, a culture writer, who notes that white K-pop fans have received the bulk of credit in the press for the fandom’s anti-racist activism, obscuring the contributions and experiences of black fans. Ms. Chaney told Ms. Ohlheiser that it “feels like a punch in the gut — that we are being used for our social currency and then discarded.”

members of the same generation are most likely also fueling far-right message board trolls, nihilist “Doomer” groups and extremist online communities with a disdain for political correctness. Their platforms of choice like TikTok still brim with unchecked extremist content and far-right conspiracy theories.

s a recent Pew Research Center survey suggests, “members of Gen Z look similar to millennials in their political preferences,” which suggests that online extremism associated with millennials is likely to evolve in this successive generation.

A 2019 Business Insider survey of over 1,800 Gen Zers revealed that a majority did not identify as either conservative or liberal, a result of either indecision or disillusion or both.

As of May 10, that number had increased to 72 percent of the population. At the same time, only 22.9 percent of people living in high-prevalence areas were urban residents — the rest were either in suburban or rural areas.

COVID-19 began to increase its rate of spread in rural areas in late April

According to data from the National Rural Health Association, chronic respiratory disease cases are 75 percent more common in rural areas than in urban, while the rate of people 65 years and older is far higher than in cities.

“For every death, there’s about 21 other infections,” she said modeling showed. So most of Philadelphia’s 50,000 people probably were infected. “They were either lucky that they didn’t develop disease or had mild disease compared to those that were unlucky and died.”Yellow fever is one of more than 200 known human viruses, according to the National Institutes of Health. They include those that cause HIV/AIDS, Ebola, polio, smallpox, measles, mumps, rabies, the common cold and now the novel coronavirus.

In the late 1800s, scientists were just starting to realize that strange microbes smaller than bacteria were causing disorders in plants and animals. Bacteria, which had been discovered in the 1670s, had been associated with human illnesses such as typhoid fever, cholera and tuberculosis.

U.S. Army physician Walter Reed reported in 1900 that the leading suspect bacteria was not found in the blood of fever cases he studied in Cuba.There was an alien “parasite” at work, he believed.“At the time they didn’t even call it a virus,” Staples said. “They didn’t know really what a virus was.”

In 1900, Reed set up what he called an “experimental sanitary station” in Cuba, where yellow fever was prevalent. He named it Camp Lazear, for Jesse W. Lazear, a medical colleague who had died of the fever that year.

After extensive testing on volunteer patients who were infected, Reed confirmed that mosquitoes were the carrier and eliminated bacteria as a cause.

The yellow fever virus was isolated in 1927, and scientists soon came up with an effective vaccine, called 17D, a weakened form of the virus itself. It’s still in use, and a recent scholarly paper called it “one of the most outstanding human vaccines ever developed.”

But in Philadelphia in 1793, the only remedy would be something that killed mosquitoes.

Scientists are also using different strains of another virus, adenovirus, as a vector or a missile to deliver genes that code for these same spike proteins and that also provoke an immune response. The vector has been engineered in the lab to be replication-defective; that is, the vector is able to deliver the spike gene into humans but once it’s done its job, the vector cannot replicate any further. At least three groups are testing these vectors.

The science is paying off. Novavax, a Maryland-based company working on this type of vaccine, recently reported the results of its Phase 1 trial. The levels of antibodies generated were stunning, about four times higher than those in individuals who are recovering from a COVID-19 infection.

Nine vaccine candidates have now entered Phase 3 human trials, the final step before regulatory approval. The fact that entirely different approaches to vaccine development are all yielding promising early results is highly encouraging.

Equally important is the unprecedented global collaboration among scientists around the world, as well as the high degree of cooperation between scientists and clinicians, biopharmaceutical companies, government, philanthropic funders, and regulators. They are all working together toward the common goal of developing as quickly as possible a safe and effective vaccine against COVID-19.

My optimism doesn’t stop with these early results, although they are key. I’m also encouraged because at least five very different approaches (I’ve walked through only three above) are being explored to make a vaccine. As we say in Canada, if you want to win, you have to take many shots on goal.

the encouraging news is that all of the vaccine candidates that have entered trials in humans so far are safe and have elicited high levels of antibodies against COVID-19. Some have also been shown to activate the cellular arm of our immune system, another crucial component of our defenses against foreign pathogens.

the mandate that the approval process be above any political considerations and solely based on data from the clinical trials. Anything else risks losing the public’s confidence in a vaccine or, in a worst-case scenario, might result in a vaccine that is less effective than those that might be approved later, or the widespread administration of a vaccine that turns out to have serious adverse side effects. That would be a public-health tragedy.

The world will need billions of doses and many billions of dollars to produce and disseminate the vaccine. My main concern in this whole process is that governments will not spend enough on manufacturing the vaccine to administer it to every adult on the planet

Ensuring equitable access to a vaccine is imperative, and not just a generous gesture by wealthy nations. It’s also in their best interests. If the virus is anywhere, it’s everywhere.

The United States, the wealthiest nation in the world and historically the first among nations in its generosity and leadership, has yet to contribute to the various multilateral initiatives established to purchase vaccines for the developing world. To date, 75 industrialized nations have agreed to finance vaccine purchases for 90 lower-income countries. But the U.S. is not yet one of them.

The cost of manufacturing enough doses to vaccinate every adult on the planet will be in the hundreds of billions of dollars. But compared with the trillions of dollars that governments are now spending to assist individuals who have lost their jobs and to prop up their economies, $100–200 billion is a bargain and an insurance policy that developed countries cannot afford not to buy.

If people everywhere—regardless of their gender, citizenship, ethnicity, skin color, or ability to pay—have equal and timely access to a safe and effective vaccine against COVID-19, the world will come out of this pandemic stronger than it went in

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

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

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

the problems have been left to fester.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

in the minds of Trump’s supporters lingers the belief that a Biden presidency would usher in a reign of terror. Many of them simply have to believe that. Justifying their fealty to a man who is so obviously a moral wreck requires them to turn Joe Biden and the Democratic Party into an existential threat

As Amy Chua, the author of Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations, has argued, the tribal instinct is not just to belong, but also to exclude and to attack. “When groups feel threatened,” Chua writes, “they retreat into tribalism. They close ranks and become more insular, more defensive, more punitive, more us-versus-them.”

“Motivation conditions cognition,”

Trump is given carte blanche by his supporters because they perceive him as their protector, transforming his ruthlessness from a vice into a virtue.

Many shift the topic immediately back to Democrats, because offering a vigorous moral defense of Donald Trump isn’t an easy task. It’s like asking people to stare directly into the sun; they might do it for an instant, but then they look away

But if you do succeed in keeping the topic on Trump, they often twist themselves into knots in order to defend him, and in some cases they simply deny reality.

That works both ways. Fear strengthens tribalistic instincts, and tribalistic instincts amplify fear. Nothing bonds a group more tightly than a common enemy that is perceived as a mortal threat.

Very few Trump supporters I know are able to offer an honest appraisal of the man. To do so creates too much cognitive dissonance.

They are similarly unable to admit they are defending an ethic that is at odds with what they have long championed. They have accepted, excused, and applauded Trump’s behavior and tactics, allowing his ends to justify his means. In important respects, this is antithetical to a virtue ethic.

As the conservative writer David French has put it, with Donald Trump and his supporters we are seeing “negative partisanship in its near-pure form, and it’s the best way to explain Trump’s current appeal to the Republican party.” His ideology is almost entirely beside the point, according to French: “His identity matters more, and his identity is clear—the Republican champion against the hated Democratic foe.”

if there is a line Donald Trump could cross that would forfeit the loyalty of his core supporters—including, and in some respects especially, white evangelical Christians—I can’t imagine what it would be. And that is a rather depressing thing to admit.

Republicans were actually more likely to say that they were doing well in November, compared to October. But nearly three in four said they expected “periods of widespread unemployment or depression” in the next several years, up from three in 10 in October.

Nancy Veits, a Republican voter in Los Angeles County, said the economy was a major factor in her decision to vote for Mr. Trump. A retired small-business owner, Ms. Veits, 81, said that she appreciated the president’s commitment to deregulation — and that she feared for the economy after his departure.

Mr. Keyston, 66, said that he didn’t like Mr. Trump’s penchant for Twitter or his demeanor in office. But he said he liked many of Mr. Trump’s policies, like his tax cuts and his promise to build a border wall and to keep the United States out of wars

. He worries that Mr. Biden will impose new restrictions that will cripple the economy, including a nationwide lockdown, a charge that Mr. Trump repeatedly leveled against Mr. Biden, though Mr. Biden did not call for such a lockdown.

Big partisan shifts in confidence have become common following elections in recent decades.

“It reflects what we’ve seen in the survey data the whole time, which is that everyone is tying their own political beliefs to their views of the economy,” said Laura Wronski, a research scientist for SurveyMonkey. “It’s just kind of crazy to see how entrenched these beliefs are.”

Democrats’ views of the economy have also shifted after elections, but generally less than Republicans’, a pattern that was particularly stark this year.

“I think the economic impact is devastating, and it’s going to take people decades to recover,” she said.

Ms. Garrow, a Democrat, said she supported many of Mr. Biden’s signature policy proposals, such as raising taxes on the wealthy and making public colleges free to students from middle-class families.

Perhaps more surprising, some of Mr. Biden’s proposals earn support from Republican voters. More than four in 10 Republicans support raising taxes on people earning more than $400,000 a year. Three-quarters of Republicans support a proposal to guarantee paid sick leave to workers during the coronavirus pandemic.

Liberal economists with links to Mr. Biden say the results show the popularity of his plans and the challenges of reaching out to supporters of Mr. Trump whose economic hopes were low before he won the 2016 election.

William Spriggs, the chief economist for the A.F.L.-C.I.O. labor federation, said that the polling reflected the “partisan politics” now embedded in economic confidence surveys, and that it offered a message to Mr. Biden on the importance of pushing for policies like paid leave that have attracted Republican opposition in Washington.

But he said the country needed to invest more in public health, education and other priorities, and he said it made sense to raise taxes on corporations and the wealthy in order to pay for that spending.

I always try to find some point where we can agree. Find some common ground. And there's usually something. It's very rare you don't find something you could talk about and start the conversation in a place you agree.

after Gov. Doug Burgum, a Republican, used an executive order on Nov. 13 to institute precisely such a mandate, a poll showed that a significant majority of North Dakotans favored it.

the state definitely should have taken that step last spring or summer — before the number of coronavirus cases skyrocketed, before hospitals were so overrun that sick North Dakotans had to be sent to neighboring states and before his own mother tested positive and died in early October.

Until recently, Governor Burgum was loath to exert much pressure on North Dakotans and steered clear of the social-distancing orders put in place by so many other states. But he did invest heavily in testing and never merrily shrugged off the threat of the coronavirus the way his Republican counterpart in South Dakota, Gov. Kristi Noem, did.

South Dakota, in contrast, was No. 1. Still no mask mandate there, and no leadership at all from Noem, who didn’t just welcome but beckoned President Trump to Mount Rushmore for that enormous Independence Day rally, the one at which his perpetually maskless entourage clustered near a similarly maskless crowd

Just before Thanksgiving, Noem announced the passing of her 98-year-old grandmother, one of 13 residents of a South Dakota nursing home who died in a two-week period. The home’s administrator told The Daily Beast that the other 12 residents, along with many of the nursing home’s workers, had tested positive for the coronavirus, but not Noem’s grandmother. (Hmmm …) While Noem publicly mourned her lost family member, she drew no particular attention to Covid-19’s rampage among her grandmother’s companions.

wrote to him to share a famous quotation from Benjamin Franklin: “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

They “scream at you for a magic medicine” and warn that Joe Biden will ruin America even as they’re “gasping for breath,” she wrote. She added: “They call you names and ask why you have to wear all that ‘stuff’ because they don’t have Covid because it’s not real.”

“They stop yelling at you when they get intubated,” she wrote. “It’s like a horror movie that never ends.”

The truth is that the Dakotas are as emblematic as they are exceptional

In resisting the lockdowns, slowdowns and sacrifices that many other states committed to, they indulged and encouraged a selective (and often warped) reading of scientific evidence, a rebellion against experts and a twisted concept of individual liberty that was obvious all over the country and contributed mightily to our suffering.

“North Dakotans will come to each other’s aids in a heartbeat, but when asked to give up personal freedom for an amorphous common good — that’s difficult,

When I said “horror story,” I was cribbing. That was a description used in a series of mid-November tweets from a South Dakota emergency room nurse, Jodi Doering, that went viral. Doering was reeling from tending to dying Covid-19 patients who continued to insist that the coronavirus was some kind of hoax.

“We maybe believed that our rural nature sheltered us from what cities like yours were experiencing,” Carson said. “Then we found out, very brutally, that was wrong.”

Vance’s lawyers have said he was justified in demanding them because of public reports of “extensive and protracted criminal conduct at the Trump Organization.

The supreme court in July ruled 7-2 against the president, rejecting Trump’s arguments that he can’t even be investigated, let alone charged with any crime, while he is in office

Through his lawyers, Trump argued that the subpoena was issued in bad faith, might have been politically motivated and amounted to harassment of him

The likelihood that the taxes would be released was unlikely to be resolved before the November election

former Trump personal lawyer Michael Cohen saying it was common for the Trump Organization to submit falsified financial records when the company applied for loans.

those misstatements could establish crimes including falsifying business records, insurance and tax fraud and scheming to defraud.

he paid just $750 in federal income tax the year he entered the White House and no income tax at all in 11 of 18 years it reviewed

At the time, Trump dismissed the report as “fake news” and maintained he has paid taxes, but he provided no specifics

“Many voters are casting their ballots by mail for the first time, so some mistakes are expected,”

North Carolina, along with more than 30 other states, offer voters who make certain errors that would invalidate their ballots—such as missing or mismatched signatures—a chance to correct them.

. For the presidential race, the Trump and Biden campaigns have vowed full-scale efforts to monitor voting and ballot counting

In North Carolina, more than 300,000 people have already successfully cast ballots by mail in the general election through Thursday, more than the total cast by mail in 2016. Still, around 3.4% of ballots returned had errors, so far slightly higher than four years ago, the State Board of Elections said.

In the June primary in New York City, thousands of ballots were rejected for not being postmarked on time, for voters failing to sign the backs of envelopes and for other reasons, according to candidates

Mr. Smith’s research has found mail-in ballot rejections tended to disproportionately affect younger or inexperienced voters and racial minorities in previous elections. Those voters generally lean Democratic.

For the general election, voters have already cast 2,105,553 mail-in ballots and 94,338 early in-person votes, based on data from 22 states collected by the Associated Press as of Friday.

Democrats are urging voters to vote early, whether by mail or in person. “Ensuring voters know all the multiple options for voting—in person and by mail—is a central focus down the stretch,” said Biden campaign spokesman T.J. Ducklo.

Academic studies—such as ones from Dartmouth College and New York University’s School of Law—have found no evidence of widespread fraud in recent U.S. elections.

estimated in a publicly released letter to state lawmakers that 100,000 voters statewide could be disenfranchised this election over these “naked ballots.”

the decline and marginalisation of the socialist left since the 1970s opened the path for the widespread moralisation and psychologisation that marks our politics today.

The latest catastrophe, the Covid-19 pandemic, has revealed the deep untruth underlying Adam Smith’s claim that ‘individuals, without desiring or knowing it, and while pursuing each his own interest, are working for the direct realisation of the general interest.’

The truth is that individuals pursuing their own interests produce group identities that have no sense of the general interest, but are rather marked by feelings of oppression, resentment or both. Only social trust and collective action, involving not only democratic co-ordination but genuine leadership, have a chance of returning us to a sense of the collective interest

There are three hundred and twenty-one testing locations in the city, and the system is so extensive that in June, when Beijing suffered an outbreak, Wuhan hospitals sent seventy-two staffers to the capital to help with tests.

When Wuhan was sealed, the strategy of isolation was replicated throughout the city. Housing compounds were closed and monitored by neighborhood committees, with residents going out only for necessities.

Toward the end of the first month, the guidelines were tightened further, until virtually all goods were delivered. On February 17th, Fang Fang wrote, “Everyone is now required to remain inside their homes at all times.”

Meanwhile, approximately ten thousand contact tracers were working in the city, in order to cut off chains of infection, and hospitals were developing large-scale testing systems. But isolation remained crucial: patients were isolated; suspected exposures were isolated; medical workers were isolated.

Zhang said the experience of working through the pandemic had left him calmer and more patient. He drove more carefully now; he wasn’t in such a rush.

I often asked Wuhan residents how they had been personally changed by the spring, and there was no standard response. Some expressed less trust in government information; others said they had increased faith in the national leadership.

Wuhan had most recently reported a locally transmitted symptomatic case on May 18th. It’s the most thoroughly tested city in China: at the end of May, in part to boost confidence, the government tried to test every resident, a total of eleven million.

I never met a cabdriver who had been swab-tested less than twice, and a couple had been tested five times. Most of the cabbies had no relatives or friends who had been infected; swabbing was simply required by the city and by their cab companies.

“I tend to take a charitable view of countries that are at the beginning stage of epidemics,” Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told me, in a phone conversation. According to her, it’s unrealistic to expect that any country could have stopped this particular virus at its source. “I’ve always believed that this thing was going to spread,” she said

The physician who handled testing told me that, on average, his hospital still recorded one positive for every forty thousand exams. Most of these positives were repeat patients: after having been infected during the initial run of the virus, they recovered fully, and then for some reason, months later, showed evidence of the virus again. So far, most of the positives had been asymptomatic, and the physician saw no indication that the virus was spreading in the city.

In town, there were few propaganda signs about the epidemic, and Wuhan newspapers ran upbeat headlines every morning (Yangtze Daily, August 29th, front page: “STUDENTS DO NOT HAVE TO WEAR MASKS IN SCHOOLS”). Movie theatres were open; restaurants and bars had no seating restrictions. At the Hanyang Renxinghui Mall, I saw barefaced kids playing in what may have been one of the last fully functioning ball pits on earth, a sight that seemed worthy of other headlines (“CHILDREN DO NOT HAVE TO WEAR MASKS IN WUHAN BALL PITS”).

Across town, colleges and universities were in the process of bringing back more than a million students. Wuhan has the second-highest number of students of any city in China, after Guangzhou.

Wuhan memories remained fresh, and the materials of documentation were also close at hand. People sometimes handed over manuscripts, and they took out their phones and pulled up photographs and messages from January and February. But I wondered how much of this material would dissipate over time.

In town, I met two Chinese journalists in their twenties who were visiting from out of town. They had been posted during the period of the sealed city: back then, anybody sent to cover events in Wuhan had to stay for the long haul.

One was a director of streaming media whom I’ll call Han, and he had found that government-run outlets generally wanted footage that emphasized the victory over the disease, not the suffering of Wuhan residents. Han hoped that eventually he’d find other ways to use the material. “It will be in the hard drive,” he said, tapping his camera.

After that, Yin reported on a number of issues that couldn’t be published or completed, and she often talked with scientists and officials who didn’t want to say too much. “One person said, ‘Ten years later, if the climate has changed, I’ll tell you my story,’ ” Yin told me. “He knew that he would be judged by history.” She continued, “These people are inside the system, but they also know that they are inside history.”

Such fare is much more popular in Guangdong, in the far south. It’s possible that the disease arrived from somewhere else and then spread in the wet, cool conditions of the fish stalls. A few Wuhan residents told me that a considerable amount of their seafood comes from Guangdong, and they suggested that perhaps a southerner had unwittingly imported the disease,

When I spoke with scientists outside China, they weren’t focussed on the government’s early missteps

In time, we will learn more, but the delay is important to the Communist Party. It handles history the same way that it handles the pandemic—a period of isolation is crucial. Throughout the Communist era, there have been many moments of quarantined history: the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, the massacre around Tiananmen Square. In every case, an initial silencing has been followed by sporadic outbreaks of leaked information. Wuhan will eventually follow the same pattern, but for the time being many memories will remain in the sealed city.

Wafaa El-Sadr, the director of ICAP, a global-health center at Columbia University, pointed out that Chinese scientists had quickly sequenced the virus’s genome, which was made available to researchers worldwide on January 11th. “I honestly think that they had a horrific situation in Wuhan and they were able to contain it,” she said. “There were mistakes early on, but they did act, and they shared fast.”

For much of El-Sadr’s career, she has worked on issues related to AIDS in the United States, Africa, and elsewhere. After years of research, scientists eventually came to the consensus that H.I.V. most likely started through the bushmeat trade—the first human was probably infected after coming into contact with a primate or primate meat.

El-Sadr views the coronavirus as another inevitable outcome of people’s encroachment on the natural world. “We are now living through two concomitant massive pandemics that are the result of spillover from animal to human hosts, the H.I.V. and the COVID pandemics,” she wrote to me, in an e-mail. “Never in history has humanity experienced something along this scale and scope.”

There’s a tendency to believe that we would know the source of the coronavirus if the Chinese had been more forthcoming, or if they hadn’t cleaned out the Huanan market before stalls and animals could be studied properly.

Yiwu He, the chief innovation officer at the University of Hong Kong, told me that the C.N.B.G. vaccine has already been given to a number of Chinese government officials, under an emergency-use approval granted by the authorities. “I know a few government officials personally, and they told me that they took the vaccine,” he said, in a phone conversation. He thought that the total number was probably around a hundred. “It’s middle-level officials,” he said. “Vice-ministers, mayors, vice-mayors.”

Daszak believes the virus probably circulated for weeks before the Wuhan outbreak, and he doubts that the city was the source. “There are bats in Wuhan, but it was the wrong time of year,” he told me. “It was winter, and bats are not out as much.”

His research has indicated that, across Southeast Asia, more than a million people each year are infected by bat coronaviruses. Some individuals trap, deal, or raise animals that might serve as intermediary hosts. “But generally it’s people who live near bat caves,”

Daszak said that he had always thought that such an outbreak was most likely to occur in Kunming or Guangzhou, southern cities that are close to many bat caves and that also have an intensive wildlife trade.

He thinks that Chinese scientists are probably now searching hospital freezers for lab samples of people who died of pneumonia shortly before the outbreak. “You would take those samples and look for the virus,” he said. “They’ll find something eventually. These things just don’t happen overnight; it requires a lot of work. We’ve seen this repeatedly with every disease. It turns out that it was already trickling through the population.”

Daszak is the president of EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit research organization based in New York. EcoHealth has become the target of conspiracy theorists, including some who claim that the virus was man-made. Daszak and many prominent virologists say that anything created in a lab would show clear signs of manipulation.

There’s also speculation that the outbreak started when researchers accidentally released a coronavirus they were studying at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. But there’s no evidence of a leak, or even that the institute has ever studied a virus that could cause a COVID-19 outbreak.

“Scientists in China are under incredible pressure to publish,” Daszak said. “It really drives openness and transparency.”

He has spent a good deal of time in Wuhan, and co-authored more than a dozen papers with Chinese colleagues. “If we had found a virus that infected human cells and spread within a cell culture, we would have put the information out there,” he said. “In sixteen years, I’ve never come across the slightest hint of subterfuge. They’ve never hidden data. I’ve never had a situation where one lab person tells me one thing and the other says something else. If you were doing things that you didn’t want people to know about, why would you invite foreigners into the lab?”

In April, President Trump told reporters that the U.S. should stop funding research connected to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Shortly after Trump’s comments, the National Institutes of Health cancelled a $3.7-million grant to EcoHealth, which had been studying how bat coronaviruses are transmitted to people.

I asked Daszak why, if he has such faith in the openness of his Wuhan colleagues, the Chinese government has been so closed about other aspects of the outbreak. He said that science is one thing, and politics something else; he thinks that officials were embarrassed about the early mistakes, and in response they simply shut down all information.

At the beginning of July, China National Biotec Group, a subsidiary of a state-owned pharmaceutical company called Sinopharm, completed construction of a vaccine-manufacturing plant in Wuhan. The project began while the city was still sealed. “That’s the politically correct thing to do,” a Shanghai-based biotech entrepreneur told me. “To show the world that the heroic people of Wuhan have come back.”

But Peter Daszak, a British disease ecologist who has collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology for sixteen years on research on bat coronaviruses, told me that it’s typical to fail to gather good data from the site of an initial outbreak. Once people get sick, local authorities inevitably focus on the public-health emergency. “You send in the human doctors, not the veterinarians,” he said, in a phone conversation. “And the doctors’ response is to clean out the market. They want to stop the infections.”

Pharmaceutical executives have also been expected to lead the way, like the construction manager who donned P.P.E. in order to escort his workers into the patient ward. “Every senior executive at Sinopharm and C.N.B.G. has been vaccinated,” He said. “Including the C.E.O. of Sinopharm, the chairman of the board, every vice-president—everyone.” The Chinese press has reported that vaccinations have also been administered to hundreds of thousands of citizens in high-risk areas around the world.

In the West, China’s image has been badly damaged by the pandemic and by other recent events. The country has tightened political crackdowns in Hong Kong and Xinjiang, and, in May, after Australia called for an investigation into the origins of the virus, China responded furiously, placing new tariffs and restrictions on Australian goods ranging from barley to beef.

But He believes that the situation is fluid. “All of these feelings can turn around quickly,” he told me. “I think that once China has a vaccine, and if they can help other countries, it can make a huge difference.”

There’s also a competitive element. “China wants to beat America,” He said. He believes that the C.N.B.G. vaccine will receive some level of approval for public use by the end of October. “Chinese officials are thinking that Donald Trump might approve a U.S. vaccine before the election,” he said. “So their goal is to have a vaccine approved before that.”

No matter how quickly the Chinese develop a vaccine, or how effectively they have handled the pandemic since January, it’s unlikely to make Westerners forget the mistakes and misinformation during the pandemic’s earliest phase.

Some of this is due to a cultural difference—the Chinese response to errors is often to look forward, not back. On January 31st, Fang Fang commented in her diary, “The Chinese people have never been fond of admitting their own mistakes, nor do they have a very strong sense of repentance.” It’s often hard for them to understand why this quality is so frustrating for Westerners. In this regard, the pandemic is truly a mirror—it doesn’t allow the Chinese to look out and see themselves through the eyes of others.

The pandemic illuminates both the weaknesses and the strengths of the Chinese system, as well as the relationship between the government and the people. They know each other well: officials never felt the need to tell citizens exactly what happened in Wuhan, but they understood that American-level casualties would have been shocking—given China’s population, the tally would have been more than a million and counting.

In order to avoid death on that scale, the government also knew that people would be willing to accept strict lockdowns and contribute their own efforts toward fighting the virus.

In turn, citizens were skilled at reading their government. People often held two apparently contradictory ideas: that the Party lied about some things but gave good guidance about others. More often than not, citizens could discern the difference. During the pandemic, it was striking that, when the Chinese indulged in conspiracy theories, these ideas rarely resulted in personally risky behavior, as they often did in the U.S.

Perhaps the Chinese have been inoculated by decades of censorship and misinformation: in such an environment, people develop strong instincts for self-preservation, and they don’t seem as disoriented by social media as many Americans are.

Early in the year, I corresponded by WeChat with a Wuhan pharmacist who worked in a hospital where many were infected. On February 26th, he expressed anger about the early coverup. “My personal opinion is that the government has always been careless and suppressed dissent,” he wrote. “Because of this, they lost a golden opportunity to control the virus.”

In Wuhan, we met a few times, and during one of our conversations I showed him what he had written in February. I asked what he would do now if he found himself in Li Wenliang’s position, aware of an outbreak of some unknown disease. Would he post a warning online? Contact a health official? Alert a journalist?The pharmacist thought for a moment. “I would tell my close friends in person,” he said. “But I wouldn’t put anything online. Nothing in writing.”

I asked if such an event would turn out differently now.“It would be the same,” he said. “It’s a problem with the system.”

He explained that, with an authoritarian government, local officials are afraid of alarming superiors, which makes them inclined to cover things up. But, once higher-level leaders finally grasp the truth, they can act quickly and effectively.

We have to stand together!” He seemed to both sense and reject the idea that Trump has made it hard to do that.

In 2016, the N.F.L. player Colin Kaepernick declined to stand for the pre-game playing of the national anthem, saying that he could not “show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses Black people and people of color.” Trump won praise from his political base by condemning Kaepernick as un-American.

n 2017, in Charlottesville, Virginia, a white-supremacist rally featured the American flag, but most of the marchers carried Confederate flags and swastika banners. After one of the white supremacists plowed his Dodge Challenger into a crowd of peaceful protesters, killing one of them, Heather Heyer, the far right appeared to rebrand, according to Bethan Johnson, a University of Cambridge scholar and a fellow at the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right

Recently, Trump suggested a mandatory year in jail for anyone who desecrates the flag. (Burning or otherwise desecrating the flag is protected under the First Amendment of the Constitution, which Trump had cited in his defense of the flag at Mar-a-Lago.) In August, Trump held the final night of the Republican National Convention, for the first time American history, at the White House; aides built a stage on the South Lawn and loaded it with fifty-four American flags.

Outraged veterans started showing up at the funerals en masse, on motorcycles, to provide protection and emotional support to the families of the dead. They flew American flags on their choppers and drowned out protestors’ chants by revving their engines. These counter-demonstrators became the Patriot Guard Riders, a nonpartisan group with chapters nationwide. The Riders required only that members demonstrate “unwavering respect for those who risk their very lives for America’s freedom and security.” An early leader once said, “We show families in grieving communities that America still cares.”

The flag has represented different ideas at different times in American history: during the Revolution, it was a sign of radical democracy, though the eagle was the more dominant emblem; in the eighteen-forties, it stood for anti-immigration politics; during the Civil War, it was used by both anti- and pro-slavery causes; in the eighteen-nineties, the Pledge of Allegiance was created, and waves of immigrants were given flags as part of their “Americanization”; during the Vietnam era, it was seen as a pro-war symbol. Immediately after 9/11, the flag had a more unifying presence; with the invasion of Iraq, during the Presidency of George W. Bush, it also became synonymous with the U.S. military.

the American flag “moves from one meaning to another.”

Teachout associates the Trump-era use of the flag with a “rhetoric of threat and strength and defense,” and told me that, in certain hands, the flag seems to serve as “a kind of legitimacy” for some of these groups “in terms of how they think of themselves.” Trump’s flag rhetoric rarely involves “the language of sacrifice or shared purpose. It’s about fighting and winning.”

The conflation of Trump and the flag has become so pervasive that progressives have reported feeling reluctant to buy property in areas rife with the flag. Just before the 2018 midterm elections, Bruce Watson, a writer living in western Massachusetts, lamented that liberals and progressives had “shied away from the flag.” He warned that “ceding the nation’s most enduring symbol to one party is just bad politics” and said the flag is “the symbol of ‘we, the people’ ”—including those who “staunchly oppose the president’s policies and behavior.” Watson noted, “Even if it festoons every Trump rally, the flag belongs to all of us.” What Teachout noted more than a decade ago holds true today: “The story of the flag is a story of a country in search of itself.”

The silent majority, if you will,” Hartley said

The people on the bridge had several things in common. All were white. They told me that they get their information from Fox News; the woman from Iowa also listens to Rush Limbaugh. None believed news reports that Trump had repeatedly disparaged members of the military, calling the American war dead “losers and suckers.” Carr said he could not accept that Trump made such comments, then added, “Even if he did say it, look at how much he’s done for us.”

It is past time for the nation to make the investments we need to prevent, detect and respond quickly to emerging infectious diseases, like the coronavirus, before they sicken Americans and force catastrophic economic shutdowns.

authorities are too often flying blind, uncertain of the trajectory of the disease, slow to identify hot spots and unable to stop the spread of the virus through targeted measures that do not require shutting down entire communities and economies.

The success of public health measures like contact tracing, mask-wearing, and social distancing depends on individuals and communities trusting and adhering to advice from medical professionals and scientists, sometimes delivered by elected and other officials

That public trust must be earned and sustained.

Elected US officials, including the President, often have fallen short as communicators in this pandemic.

The pandemic has taken a grievous toll on the elderly and nursing home residents specifically. It has also hit essential workers hard, and Black, Latino, Native and low-income Americans suffer disproportionately. As of the end of September, according to the Atlantic, Black Americans have died from Covid-19 at 2.3 times the rate of White Americans, comprising 21% of all US deaths from the disease

US government authorities at all levels should target public health investments to increase the resilience of these communities, including universal paid sick leave in declared pandemics, accessible and free testing, and workplace protections and personal protective equipment for essential workers. Social justice and equity in our existing health care system is not just a moral mandate -- it is a matter of basic pandemic preparedness.

The smarter choice is to reform and strengthen the WHO as an essential cornerstone of global pandemic preparedness

The coronavirus demonstrates that an international framework for pandemic detection and response that relies so heavily on the transparency, judgment and discretion of individual national governments leaves too many opportunities for failure.

Alerts from that network should, in turn, notify national public health agencies and the WHO -- and trigger an international response.

Finally, the next president must resist the siren song of vaccine nationalism

So far, the US has chosen not to join COVAX, a groundbreaking consortium of more than 150 countries created not only to develop a vaccine but to ensure that when one emerges it is shared equitably, rather than hoarded by individual countries. We hope that the next president -- whoever he may be -- will reconsider this decision.

When it comes to pandemics, we all sink or swim together,

2. Seriously ramp up testing The Biden campaign says the goal is to "ensure that all Americans have access to regular, reliable and free testing." It would work to double the number of drive-through testing sites and invest in "next-generation testing" including home tests and instant tests.

1. Set consistent, evidence-based guidance to stop outbreaks

4. Help people get health insurance Millions of American have lost health insurance during the pandemic. Biden's coronavirus plan proposes to have the federal government cover 100% of the costs of COBRA coverage for the duration of the crisis. "So when people lose their employer-based health insurance, they can stay on that insurance, given the moment we are in and the pandemic," says Stef Feldman, Biden's national policy director.

5. Create a caregiving workforce During the pandemic, Biden says many families are struggling to find affordable care for their children, aging relatives or loved ones with disabilities. "At the same time, professional caregivers have either lost their jobs or continue to work while putting their lives at risk without sufficient pay," his campaign plan notes.

6. Bolster resources for vaccine distribution and PPE production States will need a lot of money to distribute a vaccine and make sure it gets to everyone who wants it. There are complex logistics that will require planning and resources. For instance, states may need freezers to store their vaccines, and given how many people are hesitant to be vaccinated, they will need public education materials and guidance. Currently state governors are asking for more guidance and financial assistance.