Informed

Reading Time: 8 minutes It is this federal-support piece that has been missing, sources I spoke with say. Testing for COVID-19 has been abysmal. Lacking guidance and support from the White House, governors have been left scrambling to obtain ventilators and personal protective equipment for frontline workers, creating a sellers’ market.

Reading Time: 10 minutes Preparations need to happen right now. If you’re expecting five times the number of absentee-ballot applications — like Wisconsin saw — you’re going to need to have a printer set up for that, and you’re gonna need to have a procedure set up to mail those ballots out. And if people have to apply for absentee ballots individually, those are all going to have to be processed. Lots needs to happen now that wouldn’t ordinarily have to happen quite so early.

Reading Time: 7 minutes A public health official getting fired over unpopular social distancing measures during a pandemic has an eerie echo today, when business leaders and politicians are chafing against restrictions urged by authorities to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. But it was precisely these restrictions that enabled Seattle and other cities in Washington to protect themselves from the Spanish flu—and similar actions helped Kansas abate another influenza wave in the fall of 1919.

Reading Time: 4 minutes The really, really unsettling thing about this “news” is that if the United States government were to falter, the majority of Americans don’t freaking want the most corrupt, racist, incompetent, dangerous, selfish, greedy, power-hungry, science-averse, lying, deliberately obtrusive Administration in the entire history of the United States to be the administration that survives whatever chaos unfolds. Who wants the administration that has worked harder to erode this government and its institutions than any group of Americans in history to be in charge of reconstituting the US if everything goes to crap?

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Reading Time: 10 minutes It’s not often I find the text of an academic article to be riveting and even beautiful. Here, I was hooked: “Virtually no research has addressed response to accidents involving flowers,” ecologists Scott Armbruster and Nathan Muchhala write. “Yet flowering stalks are often subject to accidental collapse, as when a scape blows down in the wind or coarse litter falls onto a stem …” Great Darwin’s ghost! This is a scientific oversight.

Reading Time: 10 minutes California, the nation’s most populous state, was among the first to report cases. The first possible case of community transmission in the US was reported in California on February 26; the state reported its first death on March 4. New York lagged by days, reporting its first community transmission case on March 3 and first death on March 14.

Reading Time: 3 minutes In an email interview published Wednesday in The Tablet and Commonwealth magazines, the pontiff said the outbreak offered an opportunity to slow down the rate of production and consumption and to learn to understand and contemplate the natural world.

“We did not respond to the partial catastrophes. Who now speaks of the fires in Australia, or remembers that 18 months ago a boat could cross the North Pole because the glaciers had all melted? Who speaks now of the floods?” the Pope said.

Reading Time: 2 minutes Sanders suspended his campaign after voters went to the polls Tuesday in Wisconsin. The state controversially forged ahead with its primary, despite public health concerns. Results for the state’s contest are expected on Monday.