When Robert F. Kennedy’s grandson Max volunteered with Jared Kushner’s COVID-19 task force, he likened the Trump Administration’s pandemic response to “a family office meets organized crime, melded with ‘Lord of the Flies.’ ”
onths before Bob Woodward’s book “Rage” documented President Trump’s efforts to deceive Americans about the peril posed by Covid-19, Robert F. Kennedy’s twenty-six-year-old grandson tried to blow the whistle on the President’s malfeasance from an improbable perch—inside Trump’s coronavirus task force.
In April, Max Kennedy, Jr., despite having signed a nondisclosure agreement, sent an anonymous complaint to Congress detailing dangerous incompetence in the Administration’s response to the pandemic. On the phone recently from Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, Kennedy explained why he’d alerted Congress. “I just couldn’t sleep,” he said. “I was so distressed and disturbed by what I’d seen.”
How did a Kennedy end up in a sensitive role in the Trump Administration? After graduating from Harvard, in 2016, Kennedy did some time at consulting and investment firms; he planned to take the LSAT in March, but the pandemic cancelled it. At loose ends, he responded to a friend’s suggestion that he join a volunteer task force that Jared Kushner was forming, to get vital personal protective equipment, such as masks, to virus hot spots. Kushner, he was told, was looking for young generalists who could work long hours for no pay. “I was torn, to some extent,” Kennedy, a lifelong Democrat, said. “But it was such an unprecedented time. It didn’t seem political—it seemed larger than the Administration.” And he knew people who’d been sick. So in March he volunteered for the White House Covid-19 Supply-Chain Task Force, and drove to Washington.
On his first day, he showed up at the headquarters of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and joined around a dozen other volunteers, all in their twenties, mostly from the finance sector and with no expertise in procurement or medical issues. He was surprised to learn that they weren’t to be auxiliaries supporting the government’s procurement team. “We were the team,” he said. “We were the entire frontline team for the federal government.” The volunteers were tasked with finding desperately needed medical supplies using only their personal laptops and private e-mail accounts.
As the days passed, and the death count climbed, Kennedy was alarmed at the way the President was downplaying the crisis. “I knew from that room that he was saying things that just weren’t true,” he said. Trump told the public that the government was doing all it could, but the P.P.E. emergency was being managed by a handful of amateurs. “It was the number of people who show up to an after-school event, not to run the greatest crisis in a hundred years,” Kennedy said. “It was such a mismatch of personnel. It was one of the largest mobilization problems ever. It was so unbelievably colossal and gargantuan. The fact that they didn’t want to get any more people was so upsetting.”
Kennedy believes that the Administration relied on volunteers in order to sidestep government experts and thereby “control the narrative.” He said that Brad Smith, one of the political appointees who directed the task force, pressured him to create a model fudging the projected number of fatalities; Smith wanted the model to predict a high of a hundred thousand U.S. deaths, claiming that the experts’ models were “too severe.” Kennedy said that he told Smith, “I don’t know the first thing about disease modelling,” and declined the assignment. (A spokesman said that Smith did not recall the conversation.) To date, nearly two hundred thousand Americans have died.
The volunteers were also instructed to prioritize requests from the President’s friends and supporters. According to Kennedy, the group paid special attention to Jeanine Pirro, the Fox News personality. Pirro, Kennedy said, was “particularly aggressive,” and demanded that masks be shipped to a hospital she favored. The volunteers were also told to direct millions of dollars’ worth of supplies to only five preselected distributors. Kennedy was asked to draft a justification for this decision, but refused. “Hundreds of people were sending e-mails every day offering P.P.E.,” he said, but no one in charge responded effectively. “We were super frustrated we couldn’t get the government to do more.”
In the end, the task force failed to procure enough equipment, leaving medical workers, including Kennedy’s cousin, to improvise by wearing garbage bags and makeshift or pre-worn masks. States were left to fend for themselves, bidding against one another for scarce supplies. Kennedy was disgusted to see that the political appointees who supervised him were hailing Trump as “a marketing genius,” because, Kennedy said they’d told him, “he personally came up with the strategy of blaming the states.” The response was in line with what Kennedy calls the White House mantra: that government doesn’t work, and “that the worst thing we could do was step on the toes of the private sector.”
Kushner came by the FEMA office a few times, once to ask the flailing volunteers what three things they most needed, and promising fixes by the end of the day. He had “an air of self-importance,” Kennedy recalled. “But I never saw a single thing that Kushner promised change.” After two or three weeks of growing distress, Kennedy wrote his complaint, addressing it to the House Oversight Committee, hoping that Congress would step in. Meanwhile, the task force stopped meeting in person, because a member tested positive for Covid-19. In April, Kennedy quit, and he has since gone to work on the Democrats’ 2020 election efforts. He decided to defy the N.D.A., which he does not think can legally stifle him from expressing his opinion, and he is featured in a new documentary, “Totally Under Control,” from the director Alex Gibney. Kennedy said, “If you see something that might be illegal, and cause thousands of civilian lives to be lost, a person has to speak out.” The Administration’s coronavirus response, he said, “was like a family office meets organized crime, melded with ‘Lord of the Flies.’ It was a government of chaos.”
Today is National Voter Registration Day, and I want to make sure that your registration is up to date and you're ready to vote in this election. Let's not miss this moment.
The extreme weather events we are experiencing all around the country are a powerful reminder that the climate crisis is happening right now. Our postal service is caught in political crossfire, causing slowdowns in service that impact people across the country -- from medication delays to concerns over mail-in ballots.
We cannot sit this one out -- the stakes are too high for our climate and for our democracy.
RSN: Marc Ash | A Trump Court Appointee Could Help Him Maintain His Grip on Power Marc Ash, Reader Supported News Ash writes: "In an election year where the odds of the US Supreme Court deciding the outcome of the presidential contest are unusually high, a balance-shifting court appointment in the run-up to the election or shortly thereafter could easily tilt the scales in Trump's favor."
That new hand-picked justice could determine whether Trump or Biden is sworn in on January 21st.
However, for Trump to truly be successful in holding onto power in the face of an electoral loss, he would need to hold the Senate as well.
If the Democrats wrest the Senate from the Republicans, new impeachment proceedings could be brought against Trump, and with a Democratic Senate they might well succeed. From there it gets complicated. Next in line for the presidency would be Vice President Mike Pence. He too would be impeachable as would members of the Supreme Court.
In years and decades gone by, these types of train-wreck-level confrontations have been avoided by grownup behavior. However with that behavior conspicuously absent at this stage, all forms of insanity are on the table.
As of this writing, it appears more likely than less likely that any attempt by Senate Republicans to push through a Trump appointee would include a confirmation vote after the November 3rd election. One thing is certain: if Joe Biden wins the election by a clear margin and the Democrats take the Senate, the American political landscape shifts seismically.
In that landscape, Mitch McConnell would be cast in the role of the deer and Chuck Schumer would be playing the part of the lion. Good news for the deer – it can run fast, and may well.
Marc Ash is the founder and former Executive Director of Truthout, and is now founder and Editor of Reader Supported News.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper. (photo: Amber I. Smith)
Pentagon Used Taxpayer Money Meant for Masks and Swabs to Make Jet Engine Parts and Body Armor Aaron Gregg and Yeganeh Torbati, The Washington Post Excerpt: "A $1 billion fund Congress gave the Pentagon in March to build up the country's supplies of medical equipment has instead been mostly funneled to defense contractors and used for making things such as jet engine parts, body armor and dress uniforms." READ MORE
A firefighter observes a fire tornado from an overpass above the 101 freeway in Ventura, California. (photo: Wally Skalij/Getty Images)
Tom Engelhardt | Fire and Fury Like the World Has Never Seen, 2020 Version Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch Engelhardt writes: "In the wake of the hottest summer on record in the Northern Hemisphere, we are, in other words, talking about the sort of apocalyptic conditions that the president undoubtedly had in mind for North Korea back in 2017." READ MORE
The J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. headquarters in New York City. (photo: Amr Alfiky/Reuters)
JPMorgan and Deutsche Bank Named in Money Laundering Report Rob Lenihan, The Street Lenihan writes: "Bank shares were reeling Monday morning following a report charging that JPMorgan Chase (JPM) - Get Report, Deutsche Bank (DB) - Get Report and other financial services companies had defied money laundering crackdowns even after being fined by U.S. authorities." READ MORE
Homeless people waiting to receive food baskets get their hands sanitized in downtown Johannesburg, South Africa. (photo: Jerome Delay/AP)
As Rich Nations Struggle, Africa's Virus Response Is Praised Cara Anna, Associated Press Anna writes: "The coronavirus pandemic has fractured global relationships. But as director of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Nkengasong has helped to steer Africa's 54 countries into an alliance praised as responding better than some richer countries, including the United States." READ MORE
Activists during a youth climate rally in Washington, D.C. (photo: Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images)
Facebook blames mistake in system for restrictions on groups including Greenpeace USA
acebook has suspended the accounts of several environmental organizations less than a week after launching an initiative it said would counter a tide of misinformation over climate science on the platform.
Groups such as Greenpeace USA, Climate Hawks Vote and Rainforest Action Network were among those blocked from posting or sending messages on Facebook over the weekend. Activists say hundreds of other individual accounts linked to indigenous, climate and social justice groups were also suspended for an alleged “intellectual property rights violation”.
The suspended people and groups were all involved in a Facebook event from May last year that targeted KKR & Co, a US investment firm that is backing the Coastal GasLink pipeline, a 670km-long gas development being built in northern British Columbia, Canada.
The suspensions, the day before another online action aimed at KKR & Co, has enraged activists who oppose the pipeline for its climate impact and for cutting through the land of the Wetʼsuwetʼen, a First Nations people.
“Videos of extreme violence, alt-right views and calls for violence by militias in Kenosha, Wisconsin, are allowed to persist on Facebook,” said Delee Nikal, a Wet’suwet’en community member. “Yet we are banned and receive threats for permanent removal, for posting an online petition.”
Many of the accounts have now been restored, but a handful are still blocked, with no fuller explanation coming from Facebook.
In a statement, a Facebook spokesperson said: “Our systems mistakenly removed these accounts and content. They have since been restored and we’ve lifted any limits imposed on identified profiles.”
The suspensions came just a few days after the social media giant said it was launching a “climate science information center” to counter widely shared but misleading posts that reject the established science of the climate crisis.
“We’re committed to tackling climate misinformation,” Facebook said in a statement that also outlined its own efforts to reduce its own net greenhouse gas emissions to zero this year. The information center will include posts from trusted scientific sources, rated by fact-checkers.
“As with all types of claims debunked by our fact-checkers, we reduce the distribution of these posts in News Feed and apply a warning label on top of these posts both on Facebook and Instagram so people understand that the content has been rated false,” the company said.
But climate organizations have questioned whether Facebook is doing enough to cut down on untruths about the climate crisis that are spread across the site. In 2018, for example, a video that denied that human activity was driving the climate crisis was shared on Facebook and viewed 5m times.
Articles and videos about climate change can be deemed opinion, meaning under Facebook guidelines they can’t be blocked by its factcheckers. This loophole meant that that this month the CO2 Coalition, a group that argues more carbon dioxide is good for the planet, managed to overturn a factcheck on an article that attacked the accuracy of climate models. A factcheck rated the piece as “false” but it was published by Facebook when labelled as opinion.
“Actions speak louder than words and once again Facebook has taken actions that are in stark contrast to public statements from the company,” said Elizabeth Jardim, senior corporate campaigner at Greenpeace USA.
“The recent bans targeting people fighting to save their communities from climate change and the continued exploitation of fossil fuel companies show us that when push comes to shove, Facebook will side with polluters at the cost of their users’ trying to organize.”
Ruth Bader Ginsburg's life is a legacy beyond her historic time on the bench.
Because of her, young girls everywhere now know within them is their own world-changing power.
It’s very late in the month and we are still far short of meeting our expenses for the month. Very small donations are all we have right now. We love that but we do need to make up ground.
Is there someone who can match the smaller donations with a $1,000.
t some point in 1993, the two-hundred-thousandth American died of AIDS. By that time, a decade had passed since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention first described the emergence of a mysterious new syndrome. Freddie Mercury and Arthur Ashe had died of the virus, and Magic Johnson had announced his retirement from the N.B.A. Tom Hanks was soon to win an Oscar for his role as an H.I.V.-positive gay man, in “Philadelphia.” Still, the tragic milestone passed without much notice. H.I.V. had become the leading cause of death among young American men, but researchers and activists were still fighting to raise awareness about the virus, and acceptance for the people who were suffering from it. Two years earlier, the hundred-thousandth American had died of AIDS. That death was announced in a short article on page eighteen of the Times, which dispassionately reviewed statistics and projections.
The novel coronavirus is about to claim its two-hundred-thousandth American life. (It may already have done so; statistics lag.) Less than eight months have passed since the start of the pandemic. There hasn’t been time to make a movie about it, and there’s been no need to raise awareness; the toll of the virus is tracked daily, even hourly, across the country and across the world. But that doesn’t make the extraordinary loss of life any easier to fathom. In less than a year, COVID-19 has killed four times as many Americans as died from the opioid crisis during its deadliest year. It has killed more Americans than those who perished in every armed conflict combined since the Second World War. Globally, it has killed nearly a million people.
Reckoning with such a number, we might try to imagine the dead as individuals. Though the virus is worse for those who are older, people of all ages have died, and of all races, backgrounds, trades, and political persuasions. Each life lost was embedded in a web of relations. According to one estimate, each person who dies of COVID-19 leaves behind an average of nine surviving family members. If this is right, then there are now at least 1.8 million Americans mourning the loss of kin—parents, husbands, wives, children, siblings, grandparents—and millions more who are mourning with them. Meanwhile, as a doctor, when I think of two hundred thousand lost lives, I think of the ones I wasn’t able to save while caring for patients in the early days of the outbreak in New York. I think of the couples transferred hand in hand to the hospice unit; of a parent comforting young children through FaceTime; of an elderly man worrying about using a ventilator that might be needed by someone younger.
Moments of national tragedy are usually met with elevating Presidential rhetoric. The country looks to its leaders to offer hope and give meaning to its collective suffering. Three days after the September 11th attacks, in a speech at Ground Zero, George W. Bush told the nation, “I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.” Later, at a prayer service, Bush said that “grief and tragedy and hatred are only for a time. But goodness, remembrance, and love have no end.” After President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Lyndon B. Johnson called on the country to “put an end to the teaching and the preaching of hate and evil and violence”; he urged Americans to turn away from “the apostles of bitterness and bigotry.”
No such messages will be coming from this President. Donald Trump has abdicated both managerial and moral leadership. (“I don’t take responsibility at all,” he has said, and, “It is what it is.”) Instead of helping the nation heal, he uses his bully pulpit to sow confusion, division, and distrust. He freely admits to misleading the public about the lethality of the virus; he disrupts the efforts of public-health agencies, tarring them with his own brand of partisanship and misinformation; he argues that talk of the virus is designed to damage his reëlection prospects. Meanwhile, his surrogates describe the pandemic, which sickens or kills thousands more Americans each day, in the past tense.
There are those, including the President, who question the veracity of the U.S. coronavirus death estimates. That skepticism doesn’t cohere with reality. Across the United States, excess mortality—the difference in the total number of deaths, from any cause, compared with a historical average—far exceeds official tallies of COVID-19 fatalities. In all likelihood, there are more, not fewer, COVID-19 deaths than we have confirmed. And the pandemic, in addition to devastating the economy, has caused enormous collateral health damage. Thousands of Americans have had their medical care postponed or cancelled, or have chosen to avoid health care altogether for fear of contracting the virus. Many have died.
In the United States, peaks of panic have given way to plateaus of resignation. The country continues to record tens of thousands of new coronavirus cases each day but remains without a coherent plan to alter that trajectory. Because we never truly subdued the virus, we’re experiencing our newest waves on rising seas. In May, after strict lockdowns, the number of newly diagnosed cases levelled off at around twenty thousand per day. But September’s number is closer to forty thousand. We’re performing more tests, and that helps explain the higher number of new confirmed cases. But it’s also true that the virus is circulating in more places than before.
Early in the pandemic, it became clear that a coherent and unified national response would not be coming. States were left to procure supplies and equipment on their own. Individuals and families waded through mixed messages about how contagious and lethal the virus was—and about how they might keep themselves and their loved ones safe. At the end of February, Jerome Adams, the Surgeon General, tweeted that masks are “NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus,” and Robert Redfield, the director of the C.D.C., said that there was “no role” in the pandemic for masks worn by ordinary Americans. Those messages may have been intended to preserve mask supplies for health-care workers, but they seriously damaged the public’s trust in the information that was being provided by the country’s top health officials. It wasn’t until early April—after New York had logged tens of thousands of cases, and after the virus had seeded every state in the country—that the C.D.C. advised the public to begin wearing masks. (Redfield has since said that “cloth face coverings are one of the most powerful weapons we have to slow and stop the spread of the virus.”)
It’s easy to focus on national numbers. But the story of the American pandemic is really that of a virus bobbing across the country, searching for oxygen as it’s tamped down in one region or another. A pandemic that began in dense metropolitan areas has now made its way to every part of the United States. In the Northeast, states that once stored dead bodies in refrigerated trucks are now among the safest in the country. Other states, including California and Ohio, took early and decisive action but have seen cases and deaths rise over time. At the beginning of June, new COVID-19 hot spots were more likely to be rural counties than urban ones. By then, the virus had crept into small towns and ski resorts, the Navajo Nation and the rural South, and into prisons, retirement communities, and meatpacking plants, leaving a trail of destruction in its wake.
By staying home and flattening the curve, Americans succeeded in buying time for many health-care systems to adjust. The likelihood of dying of COVID-19 has declined substantially since the pandemic began, in large part because we’ve gotten better at preparing for and treating the disease. A statistic called the case-fatality rate (C.F.R.) measures the percentage of people who go on to die after being diagnosed with a disease. States where the pandemic hit early—New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts—ended up with C.F.R.s above seven per cent; the national average is now about three per cent, thanks to lower death rates in states where the virus spread later. In recent months, therefore, the apocalyptic elements of the pandemic have receded from view. There are fewer places where endless streams of patients confront dwindling I.C.U. capacity; there are fewer bidding wars for ventilators and N95s. We’ve settled, instead, into a grinding battle, in which lives are lost incrementally but no less tragically. Six thousand dead in Georgia; two thousand in Minnesota; fifteen hundred in Nevada. It’s these small yet significant numbers, adding up month after month, that have gotten us to two hundred thousand.
The coronavirus has assailed America’s image of itself. How does one reconcile the deaths of two hundred thousand people—a fifth of all the COVID-19 deaths in the world—with the idea of an exceptional America, a compassionate America, a scientifically advanced America? The most piercing question has come to be whether we live in a just America. Inequalities in income, housing, employment, and medical care have resulted in Black and brown Americans dying of COVID-19 at higher rates than whites. The pandemic has especially hurt low-income Americans, many of whom are now out of work, but Congress remains locked in a stalemate over whether and how to deliver relief. Meanwhile, in some states, more than half of all COVID-19 deaths are linked to nursing homes, where many older Americans have died without being able to say goodbye to their loved ones. We tolerate these deaths because of a communal ageism. Our inability to protect the most vulnerable Americans has become both a public-health failure and a moral stain.
The U.S. holds the unhappy distinction of suffering the most coronavirus deaths in the world. Still, adjusted for population, it ranks ninth among countries with significant numbers of cases, landing between the United Kingdom and Italy—bad, but not the worst. The case-fatality rate in America as a whole—three per cent—is also substantially lower than in many other developed countries: the C.F.R. is fifteen in the U.K., and fourteen in Italy. C.F.R. is not a perfect statistic: it’s calculated using the number of confirmed cases, not total infections, and so it fluctuates depending on how much testing is done among different populations. (If you test mostly older, hospitalized patients, as the U.S. did at the start of the pandemic, then the C.F.R. will appear higher, because a relatively high proportion of them will go on to die.) One way to understand America’s lower C.F.R., therefore, is to look at its demography. Age remains the most important factor for predicting how deadly the coronavirus pandemic will be: Americans over the age of sixty-five account for nearly eighty per cent of the country’s COVID-19 deaths. Across the world, a country’s case-fatality rate is highly correlated with the age of its population. In Uganda, where the median age is sixteen, the C.F.R. is one per cent. The median age is forty-six in Italy, and is forty in the U.K. We might conclude that the U.S. is lucky to be a relatively young nation, with a median age of thirty-eight. (On the other hand, Japan—one of the world’s oldest countries, with a median age of forty-eight—has mounted an exemplary response to the pandemic and has a C.F.R. of only two per cent.)
The excess death toll is less likely to be skewed by confounding variables. It seems to be similar in the United States and Europe, once it’s been adjusted for size. There’s no question that the U.S. squandered valuable time early in the pandemic, and it’s clear that the country has since failed to develop the infrastructure necessary to effectively control the virus. But European countries, such as France and Spain, have also struggled, and are now seeing resurgent coronavirus cases and hospitalizations. The U.S. also isn’t the only country that’s been unable to protect its most vulnerable citizens. A high proportion of the COVID-19 deaths in Canada and Sweden have happened in nursing homes. In the U.K., Black people also die of COVID-19 at much higher rates than whites, even though its nationalized health system generally does a better job than ours at reducing inequities in access to medical care. As bad as Trump has been on masks, citizens of other Western democracies resist wearing them, too.
As troubling as our pandemic response has been, the largest gap may not be between our performance and that of other countries but between our pre-pandemic understanding of America and what we now see revealed. The United States spends more on scientific research than any other nation and, as recently as 2019, was ranked the world’s most prepared to handle a pandemic—and yet our response has been strictly mediocre, and unusually fractious, politicized, and confused. How much of America’s struggle is due to bungled leadership—Trump’s distraction and disinformation, governors who’ve been slow to embrace masks or restrict gatherings—and how much is the result of long-standing features of our political and public-health systems? Answering that question is more than an academic or partisan exercise, and it behooves us to answer it honestly; what we find will have implications for identifying what’s broken and figuring out how to fix it. In the meantime, a recent survey of people in thirteen high-income countries found that confidence in America has plummeted during the pandemic: it’s now as low as it’s been at any point in recent history.
It’s not all bad. Our doctors, scientists, and pharmaceutical companies have been world-class. Many American hospitals rapidly and dramatically transformed to accommodate the deluge of critically ill COVID-19 patients; many doctors found ways to provide care through telemedicine. Meanwhile, in less than a year, researchers have discovered an extraordinary amount about the biology, transmission, and treatment of a never-before-seen virus. Vaccine development is proceeding at unprecedented speed, aided by cutting-edge advances in biotechnology; enormous investments in clinical trials mean that dozens of drugs may soon be available to reduce the spread and deadliness of the virus. Much of this work builds on decades of biomedical research, a lot of which has been publicly funded. If the coronavirus had emerged just twenty or thirty years ago, we would have far less reason to be hopeful about better treatments or a cure. Now, even though our efforts to contain the virus have stumbled, researchers stand a good chance of helping ourselves and the world.
Step by step, we have developed a nuanced picture of how the virus spreads. In the beginning of the pandemic, we worried a lot about contaminated surfaces; now we know that they aren’t a major driver of transmission. (Wash your hands and avoid touching your face; but there’s probably no need to scrub your mail.) We understand that the virus travels primarily through respiratory droplets exhaled by infected people and through microscopic secretions known as aerosols. Droplets, which are relatively large, quickly fall to the floor, but aerosols can float in the air for minutes or hours, making poorly ventilated indoor spaces, such as movie theatres and campaign rallies, especially risky. It took time, and the collaborative efforts of scientists around the world, to come to grips with the aerosol threat. The World Health Organization maintained that aerosol spread was worrisome mainly during medical procedures, until July, when two hundred and thirty-nine scientists signed an open letter urging it to revise its assessment. At that point, the W.H.O. released a statement acknowledging that aerosol-based transmission in restaurants, gyms, and other crowded spaces “cannot be ruled out.” Many reopening plans were revised accordingly—favoring the outdoors over the indoors, and urging the opening of windows and the upgrading of ventilation systems when indoor activity was unavoidable.
Early in the pandemic, we didn’t fully grasp the challenges posed by asymptomatic transmission. We now know that people can start “shedding” the virus several days before they develop symptoms; in fact, viral loads seem to peak just when symptoms are starting to appear. A recent study, not yet peer-reviewed, found that three-quarters of coronavirus transmissions occur in the two to three days before or after people develop symptoms. Because asymptomatic carriers, who may account for as many as forty per cent of infections, can also transmit the virus, it’s clear that curtailing the spread requires everyone’s participation—even the participation of those who don’t think they are sick. (That recognition is one reason that recent C.D.C. guidance that asymptomatic people should not be tested was met with widespread criticism by scientists. The C.D.C. has since reversed its recommendation.)
Our understanding of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, has also evolved. It’s become clear that, though it primarily affects the lungs, it can damage hearts, brains, blood vessels, and other organs. It can also linger, creating a growing cohort of “long-haulers” who continue to experience symptoms weeks, even months, after infection. One study of hospitalized patients found that nearly ninety per cent still experienced at least one symptom—most commonly fatigue or shortness of breath—two months after getting sick. Another study of non-hospitalized people who had tested positive for the coronavirus found that, weeks later, more than a third had not returned to their usual state of health. Among younger Americans without chronic medical problems, one in five continued to have symptoms.
In all of these ways, we’ve taken a more accurate measure of our foe. But there are still many unanswered questions—among them, how long immunity lasts. SARS-CoV-2 has not turned out to be a champion mutator in the vein of influenza or H.I.V. Still, we don’t know whether immunity to the virus will wane with time, allowing previously infected people to become susceptible to it again. The answer has huge implications for individual behavior, public policy, and vaccine efficacy. So far, less than a year into the pandemic, there’s no evidence of widespread repeat infections. But infections of most respiratory viruses, including other coronaviruses, do not confer lifelong immunity—and it’s too early to tell with SARS-CoV-2.
Even as we continue to learn about the virus, there’s a sense in which we already know what we need to know—and have known for some time. For months, we’ve known the essential steps to containing the virus: testing, tracing, masks, and distance. We also know that, as bad as things have been, it’s possible for them to get worse. In many parts of the country, winter will soon close off opportunities to dine and gather outdoors, forcing us inside, where the virus is more likely to spread. One widely cited model has the American COVID-19 death toll doubling to four hundred thousand by January, 2021. That outcome is far from inevitable, but escaping it will require a more thorough and united approach to the pandemic than we’ve managed to date. It will require us to act more effectively on what we know.
Moments of tragedy are also moments of possibility. We search for meaning in grief, hoping to find some purpose in our suffering, or at least some reassurance that we will emerge stronger and more prepared in the future. In the past, catastrophes, both natural and man-made, have led to new ideas, laws, and cultural and political paradigms. Social Security, food stamps, and a more robust safety net emerged from the Great Depression. In mid-century America, people hoping to report an emergency had to find and dial a local phone number or ask for an operator, leading to delays, confusion, and needless tragedy; the gruesome murder of Kitty Genovese—which, at the time, was said to have been witnessed by thirty-eight people, none of whom called the police—was partly responsible for the invention of the 911 system we use today. In the nineteen-sixties, the U.S. recorded about twice as many car-crash fatalities per person as it does now (in some years, more than fifty-two thousand people died); then came seat belts, airbags, and the enforcement of drunk-driving laws.
Viktor Frankl, the famed psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, once said that “everybody in the midst of suffering is given a chance to bear testimony of the human potential at its best, which is to turn a personal tragedy into a human triumph.” The monumental loss of life during the coronavirus pandemic so far could push us toward a better future. It could help restore a belief in independent science and competent government. It may help us value the essential work performed by society’s most marginalized people. And it could lead us to create a public-health infrastructure that spares future generations of Americans a similar fate in the inevitable pandemics to come.
onths before Bob Woodward’s book “Rage” documented President Trump’s efforts to deceive Americans about the peril posed by Covid-19, Robert F. Kennedy’s twenty-six-year-old grandson tried to blow the whistle on the President’s malfeasance from an improbable perch—inside Trump’s coronavirus task force.
acebook has suspended the accounts of several environmental organizations less than a week after launching an initiative it said would counter a tide of misinformation over climate science on the platform.
t some point in 1993, the two-hundred-thousandth American died of AIDS. By that time, a decade had passed since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 
