newyorker--2020-05-13--China’s Slow Economic Rebound from the Coronavirus Points to an Extended U.S. Slump

On Monday , two months after the Chinese government started to relax the blanket shutdowns that it had ordered to combat the spread of the coronavirus , the theme park at Shanghai Disneyland reopened , with social-distancing rules in effect and Mickey , Minnie , and the rest of the crew on hand to greet the first customers .
“ It has been an emotional morning , ” Joe Schott , the resort ’ s general manager , told the Times , “ There is light at the end of the tunnel.
” That is what everyone around the world @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and China ’ s experience does provide some hopeful signs for Western countries—the United States included—which are now embarking on the route that China started down in March .
The Chinese government has been able to reopen almost all of its offices , factories , schools , and stores .
Most internal transport links are operating , and official statistics indicate that the over-all economic output has started to expand again , after contracting at a record rate in February .
But as Disneyland ’ s reopening made news , it also illustrated @ @ @ @ @ @ @ economic rebound , and the challenges that the U.S. will face in the coming months .
With the Chinese government having ordered the park to operate at thirty per cent of its capacity , the crowds were much smaller than usual .
Visitors were forced to wear masks , submit to temperature tests , and show a green QR code on their cell phones , which indicated that they were authorized to move around .
Other Chinese businesses , particularly in manufacturing , don ’ t face these issues with customer safety , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to operate in the coronavirus economy .
On Monday , the National Bureau of Statistics reported that producer prices fell sharply in April , indicating that the vast Chinese manufacturing sector is facing a lack of demand .
“ The post lockdown recovery in China .
.
.
has turned out to be slower than most people expected , ” Qu Hongbin , the chief China economist at H.S.B.C.
, told Bloomberg television .
Part of China ’ s economic problem is an external one .
As other countries have introduced lockdowns , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sharply .
But that isn ’ t the only issue .
Qu pointed out that domestic spending , particularly retail sales , is still running well below pre-crisis levels .
He attributed this lag to the “ emotional headwinds ” —fear and nervousness—that the virus has created , and which have yet to dissipate .
Other sectors are facing similar challenges .
A new report from McKinsey , the international consulting group , says that internal travel over the recent May Day holiday weekend was roughly half of last year ’ s level @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” the report said .
“ They prefer to stay close to home—choosing , for example , to drive or take trains to regional destinations.
” Even some of the strong spots in the economy appear to reflect precautionary behavior .
Last week , Volkswagen said that its sales of passenger cars in China , where it has extensive operations , were running at higher levels than last year ; one of its executives attributed this to a general fear of crowds .
“ People want to avoid public transport these days , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ attitudes may change , but it will take time .
According to a McKinsey survey , a majority of Chinese people aren ’ t planning to travel again until September or October—six months after the lockdowns were lifted .
If a similar timetable were to play out here , the dates for a resumption in travel wouldn ’ t be until November or December .
Some American travel companies have already got the message that many of their customers aren ’ t returning anytime soon .
United Airlines said last week that , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cut thirty per cent of its white-collar payroll .
It is also important to remember that China has done a much better job of containing the virus than the United States has .
On Sunday , China ’ s national-health commission confirmed seventeen new cases of COVID-19 , the highest number for some time , and classified the eastern city of Shulan as a high-risk area .
The United States is still reporting about twenty thousand new cases a day .
Even allowing for some skepticism about the official Chinese statistics , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rebound in China has been limited and fitful in a relatively favorable public-health environment , how will the American economy fare in a situation in which the Trump Administration can ’ t keep the virus out of the White House , and the infection rate is still going up in a number of states ?
Ending the shutdowns and getting more people back to work will give an instant boost to employment and output : that ’ s simply a matter of arithmetic .
But the longer-term picture remains highly uncertain , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ testimony to Congress on Tuesday , the threat of a resurgence of infections hangs over everything .
Even if we get lucky and avoid such a tragic outcome , the lesson from China is that the economic effects of the virus are going to be serious and long-lasting .
• Twenty-four hours at the epicenter of the pandemic : nearly fifty New Yorker writers and photographers fanned out to document life in New York City on April 15th .
• Seattle leaders let scientists take the lead in responding to the coronavirus .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ Can survivors help cure the disease and rescue the economy ?
• What the coronavirus has revealed about American medicine .
• Can we trace the spread of COVID-19 and protect privacy at the same time ?
• The coronavirus is likely to spread for more than a year before a vaccine is widely available .
• How to practice social distancing , from responding to a sick housemate to the pros and cons of ordering food .
• The long crusade of Dr. Anthony Fauci , the infectious-disease expert pinned between Donald @ @ @ @ @ @ @ What to read , watch , cook , and listen to under quarantine .

On Monday, two months after the Chinese government started to relax the blanket shutdowns that it had ordered to combat the spread of the coronavirus, the theme park at Shanghai Disneyland reopened, with social-distancing rules in effect and Mickey, Minnie, and the rest of the crew on hand to greet the first customers. “It has been an emotional morning,” Joe Schott, the resort’s general manager, told the Times, “There is light at the end of the tunnel.”
That is what everyone around the world is hoping for, of course, and China’s experience does provide some hopeful signs for Western countries—the United States included—which are now embarking on the route that China started down in March. The Chinese government has been able to reopen almost all of its offices, factories, schools, and stores. Most internal transport links are operating, and official statistics indicate that the over-all economic output has started to expand again, after contracting at a record rate in February.
But as Disneyland’s reopening made news, it also illustrated the limited nature of China’s economic rebound, and the challenges that the U.S. will face in the coming months. With the Chinese government having ordered the park to operate at thirty per cent of its capacity, the crowds were much smaller than usual. Visitors were forced to wear masks, submit to temperature tests, and show a green QR code on their cell phones, which indicated that they were authorized to move around.
Other Chinese businesses, particularly in manufacturing, don’t face these issues with customer safety, but many of them are still struggling to operate in the coronavirus economy. On Monday, the National Bureau of Statistics reported that producer prices fell sharply in April, indicating that the vast Chinese manufacturing sector is facing a lack of demand. “The post lockdown recovery in China . . . has turned out to be slower than most people expected,” Qu Hongbin, the chief China economist at H.S.B.C., told Bloomberg television.
Part of China’s economic problem is an external one. As other countries have introduced lockdowns, the demand for Chinese exports has fallen sharply. But that isn’t the only issue. Qu pointed out that domestic spending, particularly retail sales, is still running well below pre-crisis levels. He attributed this lag to the “emotional headwinds”—fear and nervousness—that the virus has created, and which have yet to dissipate. Other sectors are facing similar challenges. A new report from McKinsey, the international consulting group, says that internal travel over the recent May Day holiday weekend was roughly half of last year’s level. “Travelers are still cautious,” the report said. “They prefer to stay close to home—choosing, for example, to drive or take trains to regional destinations.”
Even some of the strong spots in the economy appear to reflect precautionary behavior. Last week, Volkswagen said that its sales of passenger cars in China, where it has extensive operations, were running at higher levels than last year; one of its executives attributed this to a general fear of crowds. “People want to avoid public transport these days,” the executive told Reuters.
These attitudes may change, but it will take time. According to a McKinsey survey, a majority of Chinese people aren’t planning to travel again until September or October—six months after the lockdowns were lifted. If a similar timetable were to play out here, the dates for a resumption in travel wouldn’t be until November or December. Some American travel companies have already got the message that many of their customers aren’t returning anytime soon. United Airlines said last week that, starting in October, it plans to cut thirty per cent of its white-collar payroll.
It is also important to remember that China has done a much better job of containing the virus than the United States has. On Sunday, China’s national-health commission confirmed seventeen new cases of COVID-19, the highest number for some time, and classified the eastern city of Shulan as a high-risk area. The United States is still reporting about twenty thousand new cases a day. Even allowing for some skepticism about the official Chinese statistics, the contrast is glaring.
If the economic rebound in China has been limited and fitful in a relatively favorable public-health environment, how will the American economy fare in a situation in which the Trump Administration can’t keep the virus out of the White House, and the infection rate is still going up in a number of states? Ending the shutdowns and getting more people back to work will give an instant boost to employment and output: that’s simply a matter of arithmetic. But the longer-term picture remains highly uncertain, and, as Anthony Fauci indicated during his testimony to Congress on Tuesday, the threat of a resurgence of infections hangs over everything. Even if we get lucky and avoid such a tragic outcome, the lesson from China is that the economic effects of the virus are going to be serious and long-lasting.
A Guide to the Coronavirus


newyorker--2020-05-13--Rand Paul Says Secret to Social Distancing Is Making Everyone Despise You

WASHINGTON ( The Borowitz Report ) —Sharing helpful health tips with the American people , Senator Rand Paul said on @ @ @ @ @ social distancing is making everyone despise you .
“ People get all worried about whether @ @ @ @ @ feet away from them , ” Paul said .
“ The trick is , if @ @ @ @ @ jerkwad , people will stay much farther away from you than that.
” Paul also @ @ @ @ @ protects someone as well as saying incredibly asinine things does .
“ Airborne droplets can @ @ @ @ @ each other , ” Paul said .
“ If no one ever wants to talk @ @ @ @ @ ” He urged places of business in his home state of Kentucky to reopen as @ @ @ @ @ process that he volunteered to help safely facilitate .
“ If you reopen your restaurant @ @ @ @ @ , I will walk through the door and immediately clear it out , ” he @ @

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Sharing helpful health tips with the American people, Senator Rand Paul said on Wednesday that the secret to social distancing is making everyone despise you.
“People get all worried about whether other people are staying six feet away from them,” Paul said. “The trick is, if you act like a total jerkwad, people will stay much farther away from you than that.”
Paul also questioned whether wearing a mask protects someone as well as saying incredibly asinine things does.
“Airborne droplets can spread by people talking to each other,” Paul said. “If no one ever wants to talk to you, problem solved.”
He urged places of business in his home state of Kentucky to reopen as soon as possible, a process that he volunteered to help safely facilitate. “If you reopen your restaurant and it gets too crowded, I will walk through the door and immediately clear it out,” he said.


newyorker--2020-05-13--In Venezuela, Americans Attempt to Stage a “Bay of Piglets”

The Venezuelan military ’ s ambush last week of a small marine invasion force , consisting of several dozen Venezuelans and two American “ freedom fighters ” attempting to overthrow the government of President Nicolás Maduro , immediately had journalists and political observers drawing comparisons to the Bay of Pigs , the disastrous C.I.A.-backed maritime invasion of Cuba , in April , 1961 .
The invasion force on that occasion was fourteen hundred Cuban exiles and a handful of American operatives aiming to topple the regime of Fidel Castro .
They were outgunned and defeated by Castro ’ s fledgling @ @ @ @ @ @ @ which resulted in at least three hundred deaths and the surrender of the invasion force .
The fallout from the Bay of Pigs , which occurred just two years after the Cuban Revolution , was huge , and soon became a synonym for a bungled covert operation .
Not only did Castro remain in power but the attack significantly strengthened his hold on it .
He seized the moment to defiantly declare “ the socialist nature ” of his regime and to ally it more openly with the Soviet Union .
He also @ @ @ @ @ @ @ inaugurated American President , John F. Kennedy , first by crushing his proxy soldiers on the battlefield , then by taking them prisoner and parading them through a series of televised show trials , and , finally , by forcing the U.S. government to pay a ransom of fifty-three million dollars ( equivalent to nearly half a billion dollars today ) in food and medicine to secure their freedom .
A few months after the debacle , at a regional conference in Punta del Este , Uruguay , Castro ’ s confidante Ernesto @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s envoy , Richard Goodwin , for the Bay of Pigs , telling him , “ Before the invasion , the revolution was shaky .
Now it ’ s stronger than ever.
” Just as crucially , the affair telegraphed weakness and indecision in the Kennedy White House .
Although the President had inherited the operation from the Eisenhower Administration , he authorized it , even allowing reflagged U.S. bombers to strike Cuban airfields in a run-up to the attack .
But , when the fighting bogged down on the ground , Kennedy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ denying the C.I.A.
’ s men the backup they needed .
Ill feeling persisted long afterward , both in the U.S. ’ s Cuban-exile community and among conservative Americans , including some in the intelligence community , for what they saw as Kennedy ’ s betrayal .
Conspiracy theories claiming that his assassination may have been payback persist .
Those theories have been widely discredited , but the Bay of Pigs did have other momentous consequences , in both the short and the long term .
It convinced the Soviet premier , Nikita @ @ @ @ @ @ @ neophytes in the White House , and he began shipping nuclear warheads to Cuba , where they were secretly installed and aimed at American cities .
That act of temerity led , in October , 1962 , to the Cuban missile crisis , in which Kennedy effectively stared down Khrushchev , and nuclear war was averted .
But it was not entirely an American “ win.
” In exchange for the withdrawal of the Soviet missiles from Cuba , the United States agreed to give up its Jupiter-missile bases in Turkey , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ further plans to invade Cuba .
To a very large degree , that agreement gave Castro the breathing room he needed to recast Cuba as a Communist state , and to thumb his nose at Washington for the next half century .
Last weekend ’ s fiasco on a Venezuelan beach , called Operation Gideon , may have been a minor version of that event—what a former U.S. diplomat called a “ Bay of Piglets ” —but it shared many characteristics , not least its failure and the tragic consequences for six or @ @ @ @ @ @ @ some forty who have been captured so far , including the two Americans .
And , just as the Bay of Pigs was preceded by a two-year breakdown of relations between Cuba and the United States , the Trump Administration has been escalating tensions with the Maduro regime since 2017 , with bellicose rhetoric and a series of sanctions packages .
In January , 2019 , President Trump recognized the opposition politician Juan Guaidó , who is the president of the National Assembly , as Venezuela ’ s true “ interim ” President @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his attempt to spark a military uprising , which failed .
This February , Trump received Guaidó as a head of state at the White House , and gave him a shout-out during the State of the Union address , in the House chamber , where he was the President ’ s guest .
Trump has denied any prior knowledge of the Venezuela invasion , which was organized by Jordan Goudreau , who is a U.S. citizen , a former Green Beret and a veteran of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq awarded @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of a “ risk management ” company , Silvercorp USA , in Florida .
( Other ideas that Goudreau has promoted include a proposal , following the school-shooting massacre in Parkland , Florida , in 2018 , to station armed military veterans in schools . )
In interviews over the past few days , Goudreau has said that Guaidó knew of his efforts , and has produced an agreement that Guaidó allegedly signed last October in which he promised Goudreau close to two hundred and thirteen million dollars in exchange for overthrowing Maduro @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , but his representative in the United States , J. J. Rendón , an exiled Venezuelan political strategist , acknowledged that his signature , which also appears on the document , is genuine and that , some months ago , he paid Goudreau fifty thousand dollars for expenses .
The signature of another aide to Guaidó , Sergio Vergara , also appears on the document .
On Monday , both men resigned .
A well-placed Western source in Caracas told me that , whether Guaidó signed the document or not , “ What @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ball rolling , demonstrating a severe lack of judgment.
” The source added , “ That said , there is no one to replace him , and the government would roll right over the rest of the opposition .
What is desperately needed is a genuine collective leadership in which the voices of moderation and common sense prevail.
” Whatever the truth of the matter , Guaidó is unlikely to resign , and Maduro is unlikely to arrest him , for the simple reason that Guaidó has Trump ’ s protection .
In @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Administration recognized Guaidó , John Bolton , then the national-security adviser , announced that any action that Maduro ’ s regime took against U.S. diplomats in Venezuela or against Guaidó would represent “ a grave assault ” and would be “ met with a significant response.
” In May , 2019 , Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that the U.S. had not ruled out military action against the regime , and in many statements since then he and other officials have kept up the pressure by stating that “ all options are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ risks , Maduro said that he had ordered an investigation into Guaidó ’ s possible involvement in the mission but that “ the courts ” would decide his fate .
Meanwhile , the two captured Americans , both of whom are former Special Forces soldiers who apparently served with Goudreau in Iraq , have appeared on Venezuelan television owning up to their roles in Operation Gideon , which included providing several months of military training to a group of Venezuelan exiles in a remote part of Colombia .
One of them , Luke @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was to capture Maduro , and that he had been told that Trump was aware of the operation .
The other American , Airan Berry , said he had understood that the mission was to get Maduro out of Venezuela “ however necessary.
” On Wednesday , Pompeo dismissed any suggestion of “ direct ” U.S. complicity , assuring reporters that , “ if we ’ d been involved , it would have gone differently.
” Trump noted , “ If we ever did anything with Venezuela , it wouldn ’ t be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it would be called an invasion .
”

The Venezuelan military’s ambush last week of a small marine invasion force, consisting of several dozen Venezuelans and two American “freedom fighters” attempting to overthrow the government of President Nicolás Maduro, immediately had journalists and political observers drawing comparisons to the Bay of Pigs, the disastrous C.I.A.-backed maritime invasion of Cuba, in April, 1961. The invasion force on that occasion was fourteen hundred Cuban exiles and a handful of American operatives aiming to topple the regime of Fidel Castro. They were outgunned and defeated by Castro’s fledgling army after three days of fighting, which resulted in at least three hundred deaths and the surrender of the invasion force.
The fallout from the Bay of Pigs, which occurred just two years after the Cuban Revolution, was huge, and soon became a synonym for a bungled covert operation. Not only did Castro remain in power but the attack significantly strengthened his hold on it. He seized the moment to defiantly declare “the socialist nature” of his regime and to ally it more openly with the Soviet Union. He also managed to heap humiliation on the recently inaugurated American President, John F. Kennedy, first by crushing his proxy soldiers on the battlefield, then by taking them prisoner and parading them through a series of televised show trials, and, finally, by forcing the U.S. government to pay a ransom of fifty-three million dollars (equivalent to nearly half a billion dollars today) in food and medicine to secure their freedom. A few months after the debacle, at a regional conference in Punta del Este, Uruguay, Castro’s confidante Ernesto (Che) Guevara thanked J.F.K.’s envoy, Richard Goodwin, for the Bay of Pigs, telling him, “Before the invasion, the revolution was shaky. Now it’s stronger than ever.”
Just as crucially, the affair telegraphed weakness and indecision in the Kennedy White House. Although the President had inherited the operation from the Eisenhower Administration, he authorized it, even allowing reflagged U.S. bombers to strike Cuban airfields in a run-up to the attack. But, when the fighting bogged down on the ground, Kennedy called off planned-for U.S. air support, denying the C.I.A.’s men the backup they needed. Ill feeling persisted long afterward, both in the U.S.’s Cuban-exile community and among conservative Americans, including some in the intelligence community, for what they saw as Kennedy’s betrayal. Conspiracy theories claiming that his assassination may have been payback persist.
Those theories have been widely discredited, but the Bay of Pigs did have other momentous consequences, in both the short and the long term. It convinced the Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev, that he was dealing with neophytes in the White House, and he began shipping nuclear warheads to Cuba, where they were secretly installed and aimed at American cities. That act of temerity led, in October, 1962, to the Cuban missile crisis, in which Kennedy effectively stared down Khrushchev, and nuclear war was averted. But it was not entirely an American “win.” In exchange for the withdrawal of the Soviet missiles from Cuba, the United States agreed to give up its Jupiter-missile bases in Turkey, and also promised to cease and desist from further plans to invade Cuba. To a very large degree, that agreement gave Castro the breathing room he needed to recast Cuba as a Communist state, and to thumb his nose at Washington for the next half century.
Last weekend’s fiasco on a Venezuelan beach, called Operation Gideon, may have been a minor version of that event—what a former U.S. diplomat called a “Bay of Piglets”—but it shared many characteristics, not least its failure and the tragic consequences for six or possibly eight men who were killed and some forty who have been captured so far, including the two Americans. And, just as the Bay of Pigs was preceded by a two-year breakdown of relations between Cuba and the United States, the Trump Administration has been escalating tensions with the Maduro regime since 2017, with bellicose rhetoric and a series of sanctions packages. In January, 2019, President Trump recognized the opposition politician Juan Guaidó, who is the president of the National Assembly, as Venezuela’s true “interim” President and, three months later, supported his attempt to spark a military uprising, which failed. This February, Trump received Guaidó as a head of state at the White House, and gave him a shout-out during the State of the Union address, in the House chamber, where he was the President’s guest.
Trump has denied any prior knowledge of the Venezuela invasion, which was organized by Jordan Goudreau, who is a U.S. citizen, a former Green Beret and a veteran of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq awarded three Bronze Stars, and the owner of a “risk management” company, Silvercorp USA, in Florida. (Other ideas that Goudreau has promoted include a proposal, following the school-shooting massacre in Parkland, Florida, in 2018, to station armed military veterans in schools.) In interviews over the past few days, Goudreau has said that Guaidó knew of his efforts, and has produced an agreement that Guaidó allegedly signed last October in which he promised Goudreau close to two hundred and thirteen million dollars in exchange for overthrowing Maduro. Guaidó has denied signing the document, but his representative in the United States, J. J. Rendón, an exiled Venezuelan political strategist, acknowledged that his signature, which also appears on the document, is genuine and that, some months ago, he paid Goudreau fifty thousand dollars for expenses. The signature of another aide to Guaidó, Sergio Vergara, also appears on the document. On Monday, both men resigned. A well-placed Western source in Caracas told me that, whether Guaidó signed the document or not, “What is clear is that he started the ball rolling, demonstrating a severe lack of judgment.” The source added, “That said, there is no one to replace him, and the government would roll right over the rest of the opposition. What is desperately needed is a genuine collective leadership in which the voices of moderation and common sense prevail.”
Whatever the truth of the matter, Guaidó is unlikely to resign, and Maduro is unlikely to arrest him, for the simple reason that Guaidó has Trump’s protection. In January, 2019, after the Trump Administration recognized Guaidó, John Bolton, then the national-security adviser, announced that any action that Maduro’s regime took against U.S. diplomats in Venezuela or against Guaidó would represent “a grave assault” and would be “met with a significant response.” In May, 2019, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that the U.S. had not ruled out military action against the regime, and in many statements since then he and other officials have kept up the pressure by stating that “all options are on the table.” Cognizant of the risks, Maduro said that he had ordered an investigation into Guaidó’s possible involvement in the mission but that “the courts” would decide his fate.
Meanwhile, the two captured Americans, both of whom are former Special Forces soldiers who apparently served with Goudreau in Iraq, have appeared on Venezuelan television owning up to their roles in Operation Gideon, which included providing several months of military training to a group of Venezuelan exiles in a remote part of Colombia. One of them, Luke Denman, has said that the objective was to capture Maduro, and that he had been told that Trump was aware of the operation. The other American, Airan Berry, said he had understood that the mission was to get Maduro out of Venezuela “however necessary.” On Wednesday, Pompeo dismissed any suggestion of “direct” U.S. complicity, assuring reporters that, “if we’d been involved, it would have gone differently.” Trump noted, “If we ever did anything with Venezuela, it wouldn’t be that way,” adding, “it would be called an invasion.”


newyorker--2020-05-13--Pandemics Go Hand in Hand with Conspiracy Theories

In 1793 , yellow fever descended upon Philadelphia , and President George Washington fled the disease-ridden capital with the rest of the new national government in tow .
About ten per cent of the city ’ s population died .
The following year , an outbreak of the same pestilence hit New Haven , followed by reports of several hundred fever deaths in Baltimore .
New York City ’ s port authorities blockaded ships of suspect origin , and citizen patrols sought to root out refugees , but , in the fall of 1798 , the unmistakable signatures of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ dockworkers .
Thirty-five thousand of the city ’ s more than sixty thousand residents escaped to the countryside .
Of those who remained , almost five per cent would die of the fever .
A full-fledged epidemic had hit the young republic , and New York was the epicenter .
Like the novel coronavirus , yellow fever was zoonotic : the virus had originated in primates in West Africa , the RNA of which found a vector to human hosts through the bite of Aedes aegypti , an African mosquito .
The scourge @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by means of the slave trade .
Medical doctors in the Federalist period had no inkling of the patterns and determinants that compose the science of epidemiology .
The leading physician of the day , Benjamin Rush , conjectured that the disease materialized from the miasmatic vapor of certain rotten vegetables .
The newspaper publisher and lexicographer Noah Webster averred that the pestilence emanated from the ash of a volcanic eruption in Sicily .
Venesection , a popular clinical method to release “ excitements ” of the blood , did not work .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ dousing patients with buckets of cold water—all of which were , at the time , standard practice .
A young New York doctor named Elihu Smith kept a diary between 1795 and 1798 .
When the yellow fever struck , Smith was twenty-seven years old , a Yale graduate , and a co-editor of the first American medical journal .
He went straight to the front lines , visiting the sick in their homes and making rounds at the city ’ s recently founded fever hospital , Bellevue .
The first symptom of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Next , the patient turned yellow , began bleeding from the nose and gums , and “ had the Black-vomit ” —which came out of every orifice of the body .
The afflicted often lost their minds , and screamed and raved their way to an early death .
When he discovered that a fellow-doctor , Joseph Scandella , had caught the disease , Smith brought him to his own home , on Pine Street , in lower Manhattan , where Scandella soon died .
Like those of scores of other doctors who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and Smith would surely have been lost to posterity—except that Smith was the best friend of a young magazine writer named Charles Brockden Brown .
Smith ’ s literary contacts in Philadelphia had helped shepherd Brown ’ s first book into print , and the two had published a “ poetical correspondence ” in what was then a popular magazine , The Gazette of the United States .
When the yellow-fever epidemic hit New York , Brown , who visited patients and hospitals alongside Smith , also caught the disease .
He survived @ @ @ @ @ @ @ delirium to discover that Smith , after caring for Scandella , had also died .
Stricken with grief , Brown fell into a writerly frenzy , and , from 1798 to 1800 , a million words poured from his pen , resulting in seven complete novels and the birth of a genre known as the American Gothic—dark tales of terror in which the monstrous and the irrational hold sway .
First came “ Wieland , ” the plot of which centers around a malicious “ biloquist ” named Carwin , who can throw @ @ @ @ @ @ @ means of his disembodied voice , Carwin induces a fanatical preacher—the eponymous Wieland—to become a raving maniac who murders his own children .
Needless to say , the novel is deeply disturbing .
Soon after “ Wieland , ” Brown published “ Ormond ; or , the Secret Witness.
” The personal history of the title character includes the following details : “ that he had executed secret and diplomatic functions at Constantinople and Berlin ; that , in the latter city he had met with schemers and reasoners who aimed at the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the subversion of all that has hitherto been conceived elementary and fundamental.
” This was instantly recognizable code to Federalist readers .
Ormond , a mysterious and wealthy young man of boundless intellect , was clearly a member of the Illuminati , a secret society that enthralled the urban bourgeoisie of the young republic , terrified conservative preachers and their flocks , and resurfaced two hundred years later with an abundance of Facebook pages , TikToks , YouTube videos , Instagram hashtags , and a superclass membership that not only includes the usual @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Tom Hanks , Rita Wilson , Rihanna , Madonna , Beyoncé , and Queen Elizabeth II .
Unlike the Elders of Zion or the grays of Zeta Reticuli ( of alien-invasion fame ) , an actual group that called itself the Illuminati was founded , in Bavaria , on May 1 , 1776 .
They were not dedicated to global domination so much as to the discussion of what were at the time dangerously radical ideas , such as secularism and women ’ s rights .
The founder of the movement was a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ named Adam Weishaupt , but other members are hard to identify because they veiled themselves with pseudonyms .
Carl Theodore , the Duke of Bavaria , banned the group in the summer of 1784 , and three years later the society was no more .
That should have been the end of it .
But , in the midst of the yellow-fever epidemic of 1798 , as Brown scribbled maniacally about hidden voices , secret societies , and psychotic murderers , fears of the Illuminati exploded through what was the Internet of its @ @ @ @ @ @ @ late-eighteenth-century America .
Books about the cabal included John Robison ’ s “ Proofs of a Conspiracy , ” from 1798 , and William Cobbett ’ s “ Detection of a Conspiracy , ” from 1798 .
In a public sermon on Independence Day , 1799 , the Hartford attorney William Brown described the Illuminati ’ s members as a conflation of global élites and “ furious Africans , ” brimming with “ demoniac lust and barbarity.
” The president of Yale , Timothy Dwight , underscored the darkest fears of all when @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Shall .
.
.
our daughters [ become ] the concubines of the Illuminati ?
” When medical systems fail , so do logic and reason , clearing a path for contagions of fear and blame .
The Illuminati panic , exploding in a country battered by a covert enemy , which experts could neither explain nor contain , brought to the fore a theme that historians would later call the “ paranoid style ” of American politics .
It endures , from Pizzagate to the Deep State to Fake News , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by COVID-19 .
In March , Facebook rated as false more than forty million posts about the pandemic , a revelation that was followed by accusations by the New York Post ’ s editorial board that the Facebook fact checkers were themselves “ fake news.
” A theory that the virus emerged from a secret laboratory outside Wuhan , China , has moved from being a fringe conspiracy into a matter to be investigated by the U.S. Senate .
The coronavirus vaccine , although it doesn ’ t exist , must also be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ surely out to destroy humanity and plant a chip in the brains of whoever ’ s left .
One in ten Americans now believes that the United States government created the virus .
“ COVID-19 , ” the signs of recent protesters in Huntington Beach say , “ is a lie ” ; in St. Paul and Boston , it ’ s a “ hoax ” ; elsewhere in Minnesota , it ’ s a “ fake crisis .
”

In 1793, yellow fever descended upon Philadelphia, and President George Washington fled the disease-ridden capital with the rest of the new national government in tow. About ten per cent of the city’s population died. The following year, an outbreak of the same pestilence hit New Haven, followed by reports of several hundred fever deaths in Baltimore. New York City’s port authorities blockaded ships of suspect origin, and citizen patrols sought to root out refugees, but, in the fall of 1798, the unmistakable signatures of the disease appeared upon the bodies of dead dockworkers. Thirty-five thousand of the city’s more than sixty thousand residents escaped to the countryside. Of those who remained, almost five per cent would die of the fever. A full-fledged epidemic had hit the young republic, and New York was the epicenter.
Like the novel coronavirus, yellow fever was zoonotic: the virus had originated in primates in West Africa, the RNA of which found a vector to human hosts through the bite of Aedes aegypti, an African mosquito. The scourge most likely arrived on the American continent by means of the slave trade. Medical doctors in the Federalist period had no inkling of the patterns and determinants that compose the science of epidemiology. The leading physician of the day, Benjamin Rush, conjectured that the disease materialized from the miasmatic vapor of certain rotten vegetables. The newspaper publisher and lexicographer Noah Webster averred that the pestilence emanated from the ash of a volcanic eruption in Sicily. Venesection, a popular clinical method to release “excitements” of the blood, did not work. Neither did blisters, sudorifics, nor dousing patients with buckets of cold water—all of which were, at the time, standard practice.
A young New York doctor named Elihu Smith kept a diary between 1795 and 1798. When the yellow fever struck, Smith was twenty-seven years old, a Yale graduate, and a co-editor of the first American medical journal. He went straight to the front lines, visiting the sick in their homes and making rounds at the city’s recently founded fever hospital, Bellevue. The first symptom of the fever was a splitting headache. Next, the patient turned yellow, began bleeding from the nose and gums, and “had the Black-vomit”—which came out of every orifice of the body. The afflicted often lost their minds, and screamed and raved their way to an early death. When he discovered that a fellow-doctor, Joseph Scandella, had caught the disease, Smith brought him to his own home, on Pine Street, in lower Manhattan, where Scandella soon died.
Like those of scores of other doctors who fought the epidemic, the names Scandella and Smith would surely have been lost to posterity—except that Smith was the best friend of a young magazine writer named Charles Brockden Brown. Smith’s literary contacts in Philadelphia had helped shepherd Brown’s first book into print, and the two had published a “poetical correspondence” in what was then a popular magazine, The Gazette of the United States. When the yellow-fever epidemic hit New York, Brown, who visited patients and hospitals alongside Smith, also caught the disease. He survived, but he awoke from days of delirium to discover that Smith, after caring for Scandella, had also died. Stricken with grief, Brown fell into a writerly frenzy, and, from 1798 to 1800, a million words poured from his pen, resulting in seven complete novels and the birth of a genre known as the American Gothic—dark tales of terror in which the monstrous and the irrational hold sway. First came “Wieland,” the plot of which centers around a malicious “biloquist” named Carwin, who can throw his voice across vast distances. By means of his disembodied voice, Carwin induces a fanatical preacher—the eponymous Wieland—to become a raving maniac who murders his own children. Needless to say, the novel is deeply disturbing.
The work of the novelist Charles Brockden Brown created the genre now known as the American Gothic. Photograph from Hulton Archive / Getty
Soon after “Wieland,” Brown published “Ormond; or, the Secret Witness.” The personal history of the title character includes the following details: “that he had executed secret and diplomatic functions at Constantinople and Berlin; that, in the latter city he had met with schemers and reasoners who aimed at the new modeling of the world, and the subversion of all that has hitherto been conceived elementary and fundamental.” This was instantly recognizable code to Federalist readers. Ormond, a mysterious and wealthy young man of boundless intellect, was clearly a member of the Illuminati, a secret society that enthralled the urban bourgeoisie of the young republic, terrified conservative preachers and their flocks, and resurfaced two hundred years later with an abundance of Facebook pages, TikToks, YouTube videos, Instagram hashtags, and a superclass membership that not only includes the usual assortment of Rockefellers and Rothschilds but also Tom Hanks, Rita Wilson, Rihanna, Madonna, Beyoncé, and Queen Elizabeth II.
Unlike the Elders of Zion or the grays of Zeta Reticuli (of alien-invasion fame), an actual group that called itself the Illuminati was founded, in Bavaria, on May 1, 1776. They were not dedicated to global domination so much as to the discussion of what were at the time dangerously radical ideas, such as secularism and women’s rights. The founder of the movement was a law professor at the University of Ingolstadt named Adam Weishaupt, but other members are hard to identify because they veiled themselves with pseudonyms. Carl Theodore, the Duke of Bavaria, banned the group in the summer of 1784, and three years later the society was no more. That should have been the end of it.
But, in the midst of the yellow-fever epidemic of 1798, as Brown scribbled maniacally about hidden voices, secret societies, and psychotic murderers, fears of the Illuminati exploded through what was the Internet of its time: the untamed print culture of late-eighteenth-century America. Books about the cabal included John Robison’s “Proofs of a Conspiracy,” from 1798, and William Cobbett’s “Detection of a Conspiracy,” from 1798. In a public sermon on Independence Day, 1799, the Hartford attorney William Brown described the Illuminati’s members as a conflation of global élites and “furious Africans,” brimming with “demoniac lust and barbarity.” The president of Yale, Timothy Dwight, underscored the darkest fears of all when he asked his Connecticut congregation, “Shall . . . our daughters [become] the concubines of the Illuminati?”
When medical systems fail, so do logic and reason, clearing a path for contagions of fear and blame. The Illuminati panic, exploding in a country battered by a covert enemy, which experts could neither explain nor contain, brought to the fore a theme that historians would later call the “paranoid style” of American politics. It endures, from Pizzagate to the Deep State to Fake News, and presently flourishes amid the chaos brought on by COVID-19. In March, Facebook rated as false more than forty million posts about the pandemic, a revelation that was followed by accusations by the New York Post’s editorial board that the Facebook fact checkers were themselves “fake news.” A theory that the virus emerged from a secret laboratory outside Wuhan, China, has moved from being a fringe conspiracy into a matter to be investigated by the U.S. Senate. The coronavirus vaccine, although it doesn’t exist, must also be a plot, because Bill Gates is surely out to destroy humanity and plant a chip in the brains of whoever’s left. One in ten Americans now believes that the United States government created the virus. “COVID-19,” the signs of recent protesters in Huntington Beach say, “is a lie”; in St. Paul and Boston, it’s a “hoax”; elsewhere in Minnesota, it’s a “fake crisis.”
Out of work, out of sorts, and armed with nothing but digital media in the struggle against seas of uncertainty, solitary thinkers have time to imagine all sorts of scenarios. Distrust accrues in quarantine, perhaps for good reason: our most intimate home—our metabolism—has turned into a potential subversive. Our own bodies can betray us, unknowingly becoming the sources of contagion. America had to wait until 1901 for an Army physician named Walter Reed to demonstrate that yellow fever came from a mosquito bite, and a vaccine did not appear until 1937. Medicine remains a battle against the unknown—and fertile ground for writers of all stripes to infect readers with fear. But there is another theme that runs through the American Gothic—the line that began with Brown and progresses through Poe, Hawthorne, Faulkner, H. P. Lovecraft, Cormac McCarthy, Anne Rice, and Stephen King.


newyorker--2020-05-14--One Crisis Doesn’t Stop Because Another Starts

Around the world , weary people in many countries have begun to chart the promising slide of daily coronavirus cases and deaths—less so in the United States , of course , where our leader has decided that we should be “ warriors ” bravely exposing ourselves to the microbe .
But even here in New York City , the worst hotspot so far , we appear to have reached the top of the roller coaster .
But the other crisis curves on our planet—the endless rises of temperature and carbon-dioxide concentration—show no such mercy .
Just the opposite .
Researchers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has tied for the hottest April on record , and that there is a seventy-five-per-cent chance that this year will become the hottest one ever measured for the globe as a whole .
That would be remarkable , because it usually takes an El Niño warming the Pacific to vault the globe to a new record , which isn ’ t happening this year .
In fact , the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has said that February and March of 2020 were the two hottest non-El Niño months ever recorded in its @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was the four hundred and twenty-fourth consecutive month with temperatures above the twentieth-century average , meaning that , if you ’ re under thirty-five , you ’ ve never lived through a cooler-than-usual month .
That ’ s because of the carbon dioxide accumulating in the atmosphere as we continue to burn carbon fuels , which also set a new record this month , topping four hundred and eighteen parts per million for the first time in at least three million years .
Some people may wonder : If we ’ re driving @ @ @ @ @ @ @ concentrations be dropping ?
Indeed , the lockdown has dropped carbon-dioxide emissions by what the International Energy Agency estimates will be around eight per cent this year , but that doesn ’ t do more than slow the growth a tad .
That ’ s because , once we emit carbon dioxide , the molecule stays in the atmosphere trapping heat for a century or more .
“ Eight percent is not an awful lot in the grand scheme of things , ” Sean Sublette , a meteorologist at the nonprofit Climate Central @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
“ It ’ s like a bathtub and you ’ ve had the spigot on full blast for a while , and you turn it back 10 % , but you ’ re still filling the bathtub.
” Sublette added , “ You haven ’ t really stopped filling the bathtub , you ’ ve just slowed it a tiny bit.
” Indeed , the first question is : Can we even maintain that eight-per-cent drop as we come out of quarantine ?
( The second question is : Can we drop @ @ @ @ @ @ @ year for much of the next decade ?
Because that ’ s what it would take to meet the temperature targets we set in Paris in 2015 . )
Officials in many cities are worried that , as life resumes , people will start driving more , not less , because who wants to be on a subway right now ?
In the United Kingdom , transport officials announced that bus and train capacity would drop by ninety per cent if people kept up the two-metre social distancing that health officials have recommended @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a seventy-per-cent rise in bicycle traffic , so authorities are going to try to encourage that trend .
In London , aware that the city risks “ grinding to a halt ” if any large fraction of Tube rides are replaced by car traffic , Mayor Sadiq Khan said that “ by quickly and cheaply widening pavements , creating temporary cycle lanes , and closing roads to through traffic , we will enable millions more people to change the way they get around our city.
” Italy is awarding five-hundred-euro grants to city @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Some American cities are thinking the same way : Seattle has announced that it will permanently ban cars from about twenty miles of what it ’ s calling Stay Healthy Streets .
Those changes of individual habit are important , if we can maintain them .
( And they ’ ll make for far nicer cities . )
But the stubbornly high carbon numbers from the lockdown make it clear that we ’ re also going to need institutional and infrastructural change .
The economic-recovery plans that nations are now making may offer @ @ @ @ @ @ @ get at those deep changes .
Because the heat isn ’ t pausing—that ’ s what the jaggedly rising curves of the planetary fever make clear .
It ’ s not just global warming that keeps going during a pandemic—the fossil-fuel industry continues trying to build new infrastructure , often taking advantage of the restrictions on gatherings that make it difficult for protesters to organize .
One of the hottest fights in the country is raging on the south shore of Massachusetts , where Enbridge Inc. is building a compressor station to export @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s run into mass citizen resistance , focussed in the town of Weymouth .
Alice Arena and the Reverend Betsy Sowers are two key organizers of that fight , and they jointly e-mailed me their thoughts .
There ’ s more information at nocompressor.com , and on Facebook , at their group Fore River Residents Against the Compressor Station .
Work on the Weymouth compressor is continuing amid the pandemic .
What ’ s the point of this project ?
Where ’ s the gas coming from and going ?
Enbridge hopes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Shale in Pennsylvania to [ eastern ] Canada , for export as L.N.G .
[ liquid natural gas ] .
It ’ s a battle with Russia for the European market , even as Europe turns toward renewables and some of Enbridge ’ s contracts in Europe are disappearing .
( A small amount of the gas is destined for local distribution in Canada . )
Its only point is to set one precedent and prevent another .
It would set a precedent as the only transmission compressor station sited in a designated @ @ @ @ @ @ @ zone , in a densely populated urban area adjacent to two environmental-justice communities , on only 4.3 acres of land .
It would avoid setting the precedent of losing to a ragtag citizens group and a few municipalities who have cost them millions in overruns and lost shipping capacity in a five-year legal battle .
They would be pariahs at fossil-fuel cocktail parties .
Explain how this fits into the larger climate fight .
Every new piece of fossil-fuel infrastructure locks us into decades more of fracking , of methane and carbon-dioxide increases @ @ @ @ @ @ @ If Enbridge succeeds in completing this compressor station , it has plans to add more turbines and more high-pressure pipelines , more than doubling its capacity for the global export market .
This project also jeopardizes the health and safety of environmental-justice communities from Pennsylvania impacted by fracking ; to Massachusetts , where the compressor will belch more poisons into already suffering urban neighborhoods ; to Mi ’ kmaq tribal lands , in Canada , where salt caverns are proposed to be reamed out for L.N.G .
storage , destroying tribal fishing grounds @ @ @ @ @ @ @ if burned , the gas will add still more to the atmosphere ’ s toxic methane and carbon overload .
Every time fossil-fuel infrastructure is built , it ’ s another step backward in the battle for a livable world .
We have to stop all of this construction .
What has it been like to try to keep momentum alive in the pandemic ?
We have to say that the pandemic has been an obstruction to our ability to organize , and it has taken an emotional toll on our members to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , even during a public-health emergency .
When construction began , in November , we started ramping up a campaign of nonviolent civil disobedience , with thirty-two arrests from December to February .
COVID-19 shut down our ability to be on the site protesting and slowing the pace of work .
Instead , we have run virtual campaigns , and hosted three successful car-parade protests in the past four weeks .
Our monthly community meetings , [ which were held ] in person for the past five years , have moved to Zoom @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s Waldo with a plywood effigy of Governor Baker ( with his hands tied , because he has repeatedly said he can ’ t do anything because his hands are tied by federal policy ) .
He ’ s been travelling around to strategic locations having his picture taken with [ our ] members and allies .
All of this is being done with social distancing and masks !
A new study found that the incidence of super high levels of heat and humidity—past the level tolerable for our species—has been underestimated @ @ @ @ @ @ @ have doubled in some coastal subtropical areas since 1979 .
Warren Buffett got expensively schooled , so you don ’ t have to .
Last weekend , he reported to Berkshire Hathaway Inc. shareholders that a ten-billion-dollar bet he ’ d made on oil last spring—in this case , in shares in Occidental Petroleum Corp.—had gone quite wrong .
Now , he said , he ’ ll invest some assets in wind and sun .
When city officials in San Luis Obispo , California , scheduled a hearing on plans to follow other @ @ @ @ @ @ @ construction , union officials allied with the local gas utility sent city officials an e-mail threatening a mass protest where there will be “ no social distancing in place ” to block the move .
Eric Hofmann , the president of Utility Workers of America Local 132 , wrote , “ Please don ’ t force my hand in bussing in hundreds and hundreds of pissed off people potentially adding to this pandemic.
” Hofmann also chairs Californians for Balanced Energy Solutions , a pro-gas advocacy group that has received funding from SoCalGas @ @ @ @ @ @ @ if people use , say , electric induction cooktops and electric air-source heat pumps in their homes , workers will be needed to install them , too .

Around the world, weary people in many countries have begun to chart the promising slide of daily coronavirus cases and deaths—less so in the United States, of course, where our leader has decided that we should be “warriors” bravely exposing ourselves to the microbe. But even here in New York City, the worst hotspot so far, we appear to have reached the top of the roller coaster.
But the other crisis curves on our planet—the endless rises of temperature and carbon-dioxide concentration—show no such mercy. Just the opposite. Researchers reported last week that April of 2020 has tied for the hottest April on record, and that there is a seventy-five-per-cent chance that this year will become the hottest one ever measured for the globe as a whole. That would be remarkable, because it usually takes an El Niño warming the Pacific to vault the globe to a new record, which isn’t happening this year. In fact, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has said that February and March of 2020 were the two hottest non-El Niño months ever recorded in its temperature database. For perspective, April was the four hundred and twenty-fourth consecutive month with temperatures above the twentieth-century average, meaning that, if you’re under thirty-five, you’ve never lived through a cooler-than-usual month.
That’s because of the carbon dioxide accumulating in the atmosphere as we continue to burn carbon fuels, which also set a new record this month, topping four hundred and eighteen parts per million for the first time in at least three million years. Some people may wonder: If we’re driving less, shouldn’t atmospheric CO 2 concentrations be dropping? Indeed, the lockdown has dropped carbon-dioxide emissions by what the International Energy Agency estimates will be around eight per cent this year, but that doesn’t do more than slow the growth a tad. That’s because, once we emit carbon dioxide, the molecule stays in the atmosphere trapping heat for a century or more. “Eight percent is not an awful lot in the grand scheme of things,” Sean Sublette, a meteorologist at the nonprofit Climate Central, told a reporter for The Verge. “It’s like a bathtub and you’ve had the spigot on full blast for a while, and you turn it back 10%, but you’re still filling the bathtub.” Sublette added, “You haven’t really stopped filling the bathtub, you’ve just slowed it a tiny bit.”
Indeed, the first question is: Can we even maintain that eight-per-cent drop as we come out of quarantine? (The second question is: Can we drop CO 2 emissions another eight per cent each year for much of the next decade? Because that’s what it would take to meet the temperature targets we set in Paris in 2015.) Officials in many cities are worried that, as life resumes, people will start driving more, not less, because who wants to be on a subway right now? In the United Kingdom, transport officials announced that bus and train capacity would drop by ninety per cent if people kept up the two-metre social distancing that health officials have recommended. Parts of the U.K. have shown a seventy-per-cent rise in bicycle traffic, so authorities are going to try to encourage that trend. In London, aware that the city risks “grinding to a halt” if any large fraction of Tube rides are replaced by car traffic, Mayor Sadiq Khan said that “by quickly and cheaply widening pavements, creating temporary cycle lanes, and closing roads to through traffic, we will enable millions more people to change the way they get around our city.” Italy is awarding five-hundred-euro grants to city dwellers who buy bicycles or e-scooters. Some American cities are thinking the same way: Seattle has announced that it will permanently ban cars from about twenty miles of what it’s calling Stay Healthy Streets.
Those changes of individual habit are important, if we can maintain them. (And they’ll make for far nicer cities.) But the stubbornly high carbon numbers from the lockdown make it clear that we’re also going to need institutional and infrastructural change. The economic-recovery plans that nations are now making may offer the best chance we’ll ever get at those deep changes. Because the heat isn’t pausing—that’s what the jaggedly rising curves of the planetary fever make clear.
Passing the Mic
It’s not just global warming that keeps going during a pandemic—the fossil-fuel industry continues trying to build new infrastructure, often taking advantage of the restrictions on gatherings that make it difficult for protesters to organize. One of the hottest fights in the country is raging on the south shore of Massachusetts, where Enbridge Inc. is building a compressor station to export gas to Europe and Canada. It’s run into mass citizen resistance, focussed in the town of Weymouth. Alice Arena and the Reverend Betsy Sowers are two key organizers of that fight, and they jointly e-mailed me their thoughts. There’s more information at nocompressor.com, and on Facebook, at their group Fore River Residents Against the Compressor Station.
Work on the Weymouth compressor is continuing amid the pandemic. What’s the point of this project? Where’s the gas coming from and going?
Enbridge hopes to move fracked gas from the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania to [eastern] Canada, for export as L.N.G. [liquid natural gas]. It’s a battle with Russia for the European market, even as Europe turns toward renewables and some of Enbridge’s contracts in Europe are disappearing. (A small amount of the gas is destined for local distribution in Canada.) Its only point is to set one precedent and prevent another. It would set a precedent as the only transmission compressor station sited in a designated port area, in a FEMA flood zone, in a densely populated urban area adjacent to two environmental-justice communities, on only 4.3 acres of land. It would avoid setting the precedent of losing to a ragtag citizens group and a few municipalities who have cost them millions in overruns and lost shipping capacity in a five-year legal battle. They would be pariahs at fossil-fuel cocktail parties.
Explain how this fits into the larger climate fight.
Every new piece of fossil-fuel infrastructure locks us into decades more of fracking, of methane and carbon-dioxide increases, leading to catastrophic climate change. If Enbridge succeeds in completing this compressor station, it has plans to add more turbines and more high-pressure pipelines, more than doubling its capacity for the global export market. This project also jeopardizes the health and safety of environmental-justice communities from Pennsylvania impacted by fracking; to Massachusetts, where the compressor will belch more poisons into already suffering urban neighborhoods; to Mi’kmaq tribal lands, in Canada, where salt caverns are proposed to be reamed out for L.N.G. storage, destroying tribal fishing grounds on the Shubenacadie River. Finally, if burned, the gas will add still more to the atmosphere’s toxic methane and carbon overload. Every time fossil-fuel infrastructure is built, it’s another step backward in the battle for a livable world. We have to stop all of this construction.


newyorker--2020-05-14--Recent Headlines from Hang Gliding Daily Magazine

“ Take Your Kiting and Rig to New Heights ” “ Hang-Gliding in the Age of the Coronavirus ” “ New C.D.C .
Report Doesn ’ t Mention Risk of Infection While Hang-Gliding—But You Have to Imagine It ’ s Pretty Low ” “ Maintain Your Mental Health by Going for a Quick Hang-Glide Around the Block ” “ Government Says That If There Were a Company That Employed Thousands of Workers Just to Hang-Glide , It Would Not Be Considered Essential—Here ’ s What They ’ re Forgetting ” “ Close Call : These Two Hang Gliders Were Hang-Gliding @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Social-Distancing Rules ” Subhead :  “ But Then One Soared Seven Thousand Feet Above the Other ” “ Hot Talk in Tinseltown : Paparazzi Catch Christopher Lloyd Squinting Up at Hang Gliders ” “ Could Some Sort of Aerosol Cure Be Dispersed via Hang-Gliding ?
Experts Say No ” “ A Note from the Editor : Yes , a Hang-Gliding Print Magazine Published Daily Is Necessary ” “ A Win for the Sport : Doesn ’ t Seem Like Any of the Celebrities in That ‘ Imagine ’ Video Were Hang-Gliding ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Hang Gliders ?
Experts Say No Again ” “ If You ’ re Hang-Gliding , and You ’ re Up There , I Mean Really Carving Cloud , Could You Cough Droplets Seventeen Thousand Feet Back Down Onto the Earth ’ s Surface ?
Experts Won ’ t Answer Our E-Mails ” “ Lifting up Voices : A New COVID-19-Era Opinion Section Is Coming to Hang Gliding Daily ” “ Opinion : It ’ s Time We Leave Land Dwellers Behind and Populate a New Race of Sky Children ” “ A Note @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Yesterday ’ s Insensitive Op-Ed ” “ Opinion : If the Sky People Stake Claim to the Heavens , the Earthbound Will Only Retaliate Tenfold ” “ A Note from the Editor : We Have Shuttered Our Opinion Section ” “ A Note from the Editor : We Will Be Returning to Our Pre-COVID-19 Editorial Calendar ” “ Hang Gliding : We All Still Think It ’ s Great ”

“Competition Soars at Under-Eighteen Hang-Gliding World Championships”
“Take Your Kiting and Rig to New Heights”
“Hang-Gliding in the Age of the Coronavirus”
“Social Distancing: Basically No Problem While Hang-Gliding”
“New C.D.C. Report Doesn’t Mention Risk of Infection While Hang-Gliding—But You Have to Imagine It’s Pretty Low”
“Maintain Your Mental Health by Going for a Quick Hang-Glide Around the Block”
“Government Says That If There Were a Company That Employed Thousands of Workers Just to Hang-Glide, It Would Not Be Considered Essential—Here’s What They’re Forgetting”
“Close Call: These Two Hang Gliders Were Hang-Gliding at the Same Time and Almost Broke Social-Distancing Rules” Subhead: “But Then One Soared Seven Thousand Feet Above the Other”
“Hot Talk in Tinseltown: Paparazzi Catch Christopher Lloyd Squinting Up at Hang Gliders”
“Could Some Sort of Aerosol Cure Be Dispersed via Hang-Gliding? Experts Say No”
“A Note from the Editor: Yes, a Hang-Gliding Print Magazine Published Daily Is Necessary”
“A Win for the Sport: Doesn’t Seem Like Any of the Celebrities in That ‘Imagine’ Video Were Hang-Gliding”
“Could High-Flying Birds Pass COVID-19 to Hang Gliders? Experts Say No Again”
“Quarantine Protests Rock America: Hang Gliding Notably Absent from Dissenters’ Demands”
“Normal Hang-Gliding Accident Kills Four”
“If You’re Hang-Gliding, and You’re Up There, I Mean Really Carving Cloud, Could You Cough Droplets Seventeen Thousand Feet Back Down Onto the Earth’s Surface? Experts Won’t Answer Our E-Mails”
“Lifting up Voices: A New COVID-19-Era Opinion Section Is Coming to Hang Gliding Daily”
“Opinion: It’s Time We Leave Land Dwellers Behind and Populate a New Race of Sky Children”
“A Note from the Editor: An Apology for Yesterday’s Insensitive Op-Ed”
“Opinion: If the Sky People Stake Claim to the Heavens, the Earthbound Will Only Retaliate Tenfold”
“A Note from the Editor: We Have Shuttered Our Opinion Section”
“A Note from the Editor: We Will Be Returning to Our Pre-COVID-19 Editorial Calendar”
“Hang Gliding: We All Still Think It’s Great”


newyorker--2020-05-14--How Much Coronavirus Testing Does the U.S. Need to Reopen?

On a Saturday morning in mid-April , Maryland ’ s governor , Larry Hogan , and his wife , Yumi , watched the landing of Korean Air Flight 9093 at Baltimore ’ s Thurgood Marshall Airport , more commonly known as B.W.I .
The pale-blue Boeing 777 would be the first Korean Air passenger plane to fly directly from Seoul to Baltimore , but that minor distinction was not why Hogan had come to greet it .
What mattered was the plane ’ s cargo : five air-freight containers , each packed with dry ice , that held five thousand @ @ @ @ @ @ @ half a million specimens .
Since the start of the pandemic , Hogan , a Republican , had responded aggressively—he was one of the first governors in the country to close his state ’ s schools—but his efforts had been hampered by a persistent shortage of tests .
On March 15th , he joined Ralph Northam , the governor of Virginia , and Muriel Bowser , the mayor of Washington , D.C. , in asking Donald Trump to provide funding for drive-through testing sites in the capital region .
Two weeks later , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Post , with Governor Gretchen Whitmer , of Michigan , that pleaded with the federal government for more test kits and other medical supplies .
But although Hogan wanted , as he told PBS , “ as much help as we possibly can from the federal government , as quickly as possible , ” he was not counting on it .
“ We ’ re taking actions on our own , ” he said .
“ We just have to get things done , no matter how we get them done.
” The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cost about nine and a half million dollars , or nineteen dollars per test , marked the end of a secretive procurement process that Maryland state officials had dubbed Operation Enduring Friendship .
The effort began on March 28th , when Yumi Hogan , who had immigrated from South Korea while in her twenties , joined her husband on a call to the Korean Ambassador .
“ We made a personal plea in Korean asking for their assistance , ” the Governor would say later .
“ That call set in motion twenty-two @ @ @ @ @ @ @ negotiations , and protocols between our scientists and doctors , eight Maryland state-government agencies , and our counterparts in Korea.
” Not long before the negotiations began , a shipment of N95 masks that the state of Massachusetts had ordered from BJ ’ s Wholesale Club was confiscated by federal authorities at the Port of New York .
Maryland state officials decided to keep the shipment of test kits secret from the federal government until the last minute , and chartered the flight to land at B.W.I .
instead of Dulles , Korean @ @ @ @ @ @ @ We landed it there with a large contingent of Maryland National Guard and Maryland State Police , because this was an enormously valuable payload , ” Hogan told the Washington Post .
“ It was like Fort Knox to us.
” The news of Maryland ’ s extraordinary efforts to secure COVID-19 test kits arrived just as the Trump Administration was launching a renewed push to persuade the public that the country ’ s testing problem was finally under control .
At a coronavirus-task-force press briefing two days later , Donald Trump was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
“ The governor of Maryland could ’ ve called Mike Pence , could ’ ve saved a lot of money , ” the President said .
“ I don ’ t think he needed to go to South Korea.
” Trump boasted that “ the United States has conducted millions more tests than any other country .
You can add them all up and they don ’ t catch us.
” On April 27th , during a Rose Garden press conference to introduce his Administration ’ s new testing “ blueprint , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ We are continuing to rapidly expand our capacity and confident that we have enough testing to begin reopening , ” Trump said .
“ The testing is not going to be a problem at all .
In fact , it ’ s going to be one of the great assets that we have.
” Trump ’ s optimism was echoed a couple days later by his son-in-law and senior adviser , Jared Kushner , who told the hosts of “ Fox and Friends ” that he was “ very confident that we @ @ @ @ @ @ @ start opening the country.
” In one respect , Trump was correct : during the first week of May , the U.S. tested an average of two hundred and sixty-five thousand people per day , far more than any other country .
And although America still lags in per-capita testing , or when judged by the size of its epidemic , the U.S. has done more cumulative tests than any other country by a comfortable margin .
And yet the assurances of Trump and Kushner that the U.S. is testing in sufficient numbers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ shared , even among members of their own party .
On the same day that Kushner appeared on “ Fox and Friends , ” Senator Tim Scott , of South Carolina , sent a letter to Alex Azar , the Secretary of Health and Human Services , noting that officials in his state estimated that , for every confirmed case of COVID-19 in South Carolina , there were five more undiagnosed cases .
“ As states and localities across the nation develop plans to reopen their economies , ” Scott wrote , “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ testing capacity has become increasingly urgent.
” Lamar Alexander , of Tennessee , made a similar point at a Senate hearing last Thursday : “ To contain the disease and give confidence to Americans that it is safe to leave our homes , we will need tens of millions of tests , many more than our current technologies can produce.
” Public-health experts are unanimous that widespread testing—along with contact tracing and isolation—is the only alternative to mass lockdowns short of letting people suffer and die in unchecked outbreaks .
“ Testing , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are all exactly the same strategy , ” Ashish Jha , the director of Harvard ’ s Global Health Institute , told me recently .
“ You want to keep infected people away from susceptible people .
When you don ’ t know who ’ s infected and who ’ s susceptible , you shut everything down .
You keep everyone in their homes.
” For this reason , Jha said , “ Every single test you have buys you a little tiny bit more freedom.
” It might be plausible to say @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a country on lockdown .
“ But that ’ s not the question , ” Jha said .
“ The question in front of us is : Can we safely open and do we have enough tests for that ?
I don ’ t know anyone who thinks that we do , maybe except for the President.
” In mid-April , Jha and his colleagues published a blog post arguing that the country needed to be doing at least half a million tests per day to even think about lifting the mitigation measures @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to stop the spread of the disease .
Last week , they updated that number to nine hundred thousand , and published state-by-state minimum targets .
As of May 6th , only seven states were meeting their goals .
Maryland was not among them .
In the two weeks after the South Korean test kits arrived , the state improved its daily average by seventy per cent , to nearly five thousand tests per day .
But that number was nowhere near the goal of ten thousand per day that Hogan had set @ @ @ @ @ @ @ thousand that Jha and his colleagues said were needed .
According to the Washington Post , the state was stymied by the lack of several components—including swabs , viral transport media , and reagents—that it needed to make full use of the kits .

Jha says that members of Trump’s coronavirus task force are well aware of the shortfall. “I talk to a lot of folks at the White House,” he told me. “In the past month, I have not had a single person tell me that they disagree with my calculations, except to say that I’m being too conservative and we need more than that. Which I’m fine with, because I agree with that. But I have not had a single person there tell me that I’m overshooting. They basically are, like, ‘Well, the President controls the message. We can’t control the message.’ ”
On Monday, Trump opened another Rose Garden press conference with the claim that America has “the most advanced and robust testing system anywhere in the world, by far.” With jars of nasal swabs and test instruments arrayed on each side of him, Trump announced that his Administration expected to see nearly thirteen million tests—about four hundred and fifteen thousand per day—completed in May. “We have met the moment, and we have prevailed,” he said. Trump went on to claim, much as he had in early March, during a visit to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that, “if somebody wants to be tested right now, they’ll be able to be tested.” It was left to his testing czar, Admiral Brett Giroir, to clarify to reporters that “everybody who needs a test”—meaning people who have COVID-19 symptoms or contact with a confirmed case—“can get a test.”
Reached by e-mail, Giroir told me that “our nation has a clear and sustainable pathway to meet our current needs for Phase One opening.” According to the White House’s “Guidelines for Opening Up America Again,” Phase One still involves substantial restrictions: it means that schools and bars will remain closed, visits to nursing homes and hospitals will remain prohibited, working from home will continue to be encouraged, and strict physical-distancing protocols will remain in place. When I asked him about Jha’s allegation that the White House knew its goals were insufficient, Giroir said that “Dr. Jha is an esteemed colleague” and allowed that Jha’s original goal, of half a million daily tests, “may be accurate, especially if testing is not targeted.” Still, Giroir predicted that the country’s current capacity, if focussed appropriately, would be “more than sufficient for safe reopening.”
Jha told me that he doesn’t know “a single public-health expert who believes that we have an adequate number of tests,” but there is far less consensus about what that adequate number might be. Among economists and epidemiologists, estimates for the minimum number of daily diagnostic tests required to safely reopen the economy range from five hundred thousand to twenty-five million. Some of this variability can be explained by competing estimates of unknown cases, or by the persistent growth of the epidemic over time. Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, co-authored several reports, published in late March and early April, that called for a minimum of seven hundred and fifty thousand tests per week. She now thinks Jha’s original call for half a million tests per day is closer to the mark. “Our estimates were made based on the peak number of medical visits during influenza season,” she told me recently. But, once we hit the point “where we were doing over a million tests a week and still finding a very high per cent positive, it was clear that seven hundred and fifty thousand was not enough.” (Rivers, like most epidemiologists, says that antibody tests are of limited use in stopping disease outbreaks, given the time it takes for the body to produce a measurable immune response.)
A more important reason for the wide range is that there is no agreement, either scientific or political, about what the goal of comprehensive testing ought to be. Paul Romer, an economist at New York University, thinks the country needs to test more than twenty million people a day to limit the spread of COVID-19 to less than five per cent of the population. Meanwhile, Danielle Allen, the director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, at Harvard, has proposed a plan to avoid further rounds of large-scale social distancing. To achieve this, she and her co-authors recommended building a network of mega-labs that would allow the analysis of at least five million tests a day. Those tests would enable a massive program of testing, contact tracing, and supported isolation. “You basically start by testing even mildly symptomatic people, so you don’t limit it just to people walking into the hospital,” she explained to me recently. “Then you also do contact tracing, and, when you find the list of people who’ve been exposed to the virus, you test all of them, both asymptomatic and symptomatic. And then, again, for everybody that’s positive, you trace and you test all their contacts, too. That’s what takes the numbers up.”
Giroir, the testing czar, says that he does not expect to be able to extinguish the disease entirely. “We must assume that there will be continued circulation at low levels with potential flare ups,” he wrote. The White House’s goals, he told me, included preventing the epidemic from overwhelming health-care capacity, protecting the elderly and other high-risk groups, and keeping local outbreaks from causing sustained community transmission. At a press conference in late April, Trump suggested that “we’re getting very close” to doing more than the five million daily tests proposed by Allen; on the same day, Giroir told Time, “there is absolutely no way on Earth, on this planet or any other planet, that we can do 20 million tests a day, or even five million tests a day.” In his e-mail, he suggested a much more modest goal. “There is no roadblock,” he wrote, “to achieving 1+ million tests per day by Fall of 2020.”
Scott Becker, the C.E.O. of the Association of Public Health Laboratories, told me that, given current technologies, a realistic best-case scenario during the next couple of months would be a three-fold increase in the country’s testing capacity, which would come close to achieving the nine hundred thousand tests a day recommended by Jha. Julie Khani, the head of the American Clinical Laboratory Association, a trade group that represents major commercial labs, such as Quest and LabCorp, agreed with Becker’s estimate. To get there, Khani said, “We need to make sure that every hospital, every academic lab, every commercial lab that has the expertise to perform this testing has the necessary resources to do so. This is going to take all of these laboratories working together if we’re going to meet those goals.”
So far, however, there is little evidence of any such coördination. In March, as COVID-19 spread through the Seattle area, the virology laboratory at the University of Washington rapidly expanded its capacity. With the financial backing of the state government and the university, the lab rented an additional fourteen thousand square feet, blew out several walls, put in wiring and pipes, and installed two new Roche instruments, improving its capacity from a thousand tests per day to eighty-five hundred. “We’ve had electricians, plumbers, carpenters—everybody just getting through there as quick as possible, trying to get us ready to go,” Keith Jerome, the lab’s director, told me. As of this past week, however, he and his colleagues were running at about a third of their current capacity. The trouble, Jerome said, “is that the front-line providers don’t have access to enough collection kits, enough swabs and transport media, to take the samples to send to us.” Jerome says that he could imagine increasing the lab’s capacity by as much as five hundred per cent, but the demand shortages have proved a strong disincentive. “It’s silly to go from having five thousand testing slots unused every day to having eight thousand unused.”
Brian Jackson, an associate professor of pathology at the University of Utah and a consultant for ARUP, a large commercial lab, says that financial uncertainty is one of the major constraints holding back the country’s testing capacity. “It’s a complicated supply chain, with different reagents and different instruments,” he told me. “Every organization along that supply chain has to make an independent decision: Do we spend a lot of money to scale this up, in hopes that we’re going to recoup that investment down the road? Even if it’s physically possible to scale up massively, I’m having a hard time seeing how the whole industry is just going to magically, in a coördinated fashion, scale up all at the same time.”
Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, at the University of Minnesota, chairs a working group on testing convened by Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz. “Reagents and swabs have been a major challenge day after day after day,” Osterholm told me. “I can’t tell you how many reagent people we’ve talked to have said, ‘Why should we invest millions and millions of dollars in new manufacturing capacity? In eighteen months, it’s probably all going to be over with, and then we’re going to be left holding the bag.’ ”
The federal government has taken some steps to relieve the shortages of COVID-19-test components. At a press conference on Monday, Trump announced that the government would be shipping nearly thirteen million swabs and nearly ten million tubes of viral transport media to labs in May. And, on April 29th, the Defense Department announced that it would invoke the Defense Production Act and spend seventy-five-and-a-half million dollars to double the output of a swab factory in Maine. Nevertheless, the Administration largely has been reluctant to involve itself in the business of coördinating the testing supply chain. “The governors wanted to have total control over the opening of their states, but now they want to have us, the federal government, do the testing,” Trump said during a briefing on April 19th. “You can’t have it both ways. Testing is a local thing.” At one point during the briefing, the President referred to the “tremendous capacity” that existed in labs like Jerome’s, but he seemed unaware that this was a symptom of, and not a solution for, the larger problems. When a reporter asked about the lack of test components, such as swabs and reagents, Trump waved him off. “We’re in great shape,” the President said. “Reagents and swabs are so easy to get.”